Is The Gingerbread Man making an appearance in your classroom this holiday season? Even as third-graders, my students loved this cookie caper. And, as a teacher, I loved that several versions of the story existed. We sized up the similarities and differences between characters, settings, and plots. We analyzed the behaviors of the married couple, the cocky cookie, and the sly fox. And together we reached a clear understanding of cause and effect!
Hey, I have an idea! Let’s bake a batch of gingerbread-themed activities! How do y’all incorporate The Gingerbread Man and a gingerbread theme into your teaching plans? Please share!
Joyfully,
Diane
I got this amazing idea from KristenKindergarten. We are doing an entire month unit on “Holidays Around the World with the Gingerbread Man”. His first stop was Mexico and now he is on his way to Brazil. He sends packages to our school office to let us know where he is and how each place celebrates the Holiday.
The students love going to the office to see what the Gingerbread man has delivered.
In my PreK class we are doing the story this week. Kids are learning to repeat the phrases in the story, sort gingerbread men by size, playing with homemade gingerbread playdough , making their own cookies, and making a gingerbread house… Just to name a few things!
I do Gingerbread Geography every year. I ask families to send a note to all out of town/state/country family and friends asking them to send the child a postcard/letter from where they live or vacationed and how they saw the GB Man and how he got away. We read these (they LOVE getting mail) and we track on the maps where he was. It’s a start to learning about other countries and reading the creative writing is wonderful!!
We are doing the gingerbread theme next week. Its one of our favorites. I read all the variations, I put gingerbread mix in the sensory table. We bake the cookies and decorate and for art we make gingerbread dolls I put have the kids stuff the dolls with cotton balls with ginger sprinkled on. Math is counting and sorting the gingerbread men by size, and gender for the youngest ones.
I love the idea beckym has of taking him around the world. Perhaps next year.
I always do a comparison with the Gingerbread man and Jan Brett’s Gingerbread Baby. We do a story map and then a venn diagram to compare the stories. Last year I discovered a GREAT new resource. It’s a story by John Lithgow called “Marsupial Sue presents the Runaway Pancake.” It’s on Tumblebooks narrated by John Lithgow. They LOVE it.
I do a whole unit on Jan Brett, so we also read Gingerbread Friends, The Mitten, and several others. When I taught kindergarten, I made playdough with brown food coloring and scented it with ginger and spices. It was great. They could make their words with it and such.
I always make gingerbread houses using the school milk cartons. You just need to make sure the cartons are washed and dry a couple days. You can make royal icing or you can just add crea, of tartar canned icing. I have parents send graham crackers and whatever candies they think would be good for decorating. ALWAYS get more graham crackers than you think you need if they don’t break right. It takes 6 to make a house 4 around the sides and two for the roof. put a BIG glob of frosting on the back of the roof pieces so they will still to the carton. We also put a big blob on the bottom of the containter so it will stick to the plate. Of course, we do a little fraction practice, breaking the crackers in 1/2 to use them. You can also have them break off a 1/4to make a door open a little if you want. I have found the very best way to do this activity with 1st graders is to put the frosting in baggies or pastry bags and twist the end and snip the other end, so they are using the frosting like glue. They kstill get messy, but not like if they are using knives. I have them decorate the roof last so it has a little more time to set before getting the extra weight. They also like to decorate the plate with paths and fences, etc.
In my preschool class we read “The Gingerbread Baby” by Jan Brett. Afterwards we roll out the dough, pop the cookies into the oven, and then move onto our next activity which will be interrupted by a scream from the kitchen when the Gingerbread Baby escapes from the oven. We then lead our class on a chase for the Gingerbread Baby as we follow a candy trail to his gingerbread house. Afterwards we assemble milk carton houses and we place a gingerbread baby inside the house.
We have been talking about Gingerbreads last and this week. Today we built our own gingerbread house out of a box. They love doing it. We made our on tree and snowman. This afternoon they will make their own gingerbread man and ladies to go into our gingerbead house.
In Kindergarten we read the different versions of The Gingerbread Man including Gingerbread Baby and Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. The children make stick puppets of the main characters and practice retelling the story. We sort gingerbread men according to different attributes, decorate gingerbread cookies, graph what part of the cookie was eaten first. We also did a writing activity to describe our gingerbread men.
I teach preschool disabled, and after reading the Gingerbread Boy and we follow a recipe chart to make home-made gingerbread cookies (see recipesto reading.com). The children go with me to the kitchen to see the cookies go into the oven. We then go back to the classroom to have work time. One of my paras takes the cookies out of the oven when they are done and hides them so she can run them back to our class when the children are out. As a class we go back to the kitchen and the cookies sheets are there with a few crumbs and an note the says, “I ran to the office as fast as I can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man”. Each note sends us to a different place in the school, and when we get back to our class they are there. The excitement is unbelievable! The children talk about it for years to come!
We do several different things to incorporate the gingerbread man. We make a color book, each page has a little gingerbread boy on it and at the top we print this little gingerbread boy is (blue or whatever colors you are working on). We made a file folder game of matching different gingerbread boys with numbers on them to the same on the file folder.
What timing! I just started my Gingerbread week today!! We are going to be doing lots of math with gingerbread men–patterns, symmetry, counting, and ordering numbers. We are also going to make our own man out of Gingerbread playdough. We will let him dry, decorate him, write a story about him, and then wrap him up as a present for Christmas!! My Kindergarten kiddos love the different versions of the books, as well! Having him go around the world is something I hadn’t thought of….maybe next year??
The gingerbread stories are all compared and discussed and then we make our own gingerbread which are baked at recess and magically disappear (thanks to the cook) and leave a picture clue as to where they ran away to. They eventually end up in their mailboxes because they want to go home with everyone after their adventure. The kids love and and believe it!!
What fun ideas…I have nothing to add, but I love all the great food for thought. Thanks every one. J
We read the Gingerbread story and we also have the children to different art projects to do with the gingerbread man. One of my favorite projects that we do with the children in my class is we cut out gingerbread boys for the boys in the class and gingerbread girls for the girls in the class we send then home with the kids and ask the parents to help their child decorate their gingerbread any way they want and return them to school and we hang them on our bulletin board for everyone to see. They come back so cute and everyone it decorated very different it is so cute!!!
I just finished my gingerbread unit last week. I read a different version of the Gingerbread Man each day. Some of them include Gingerbread Baby, Gingerbread Cowboy, Gingerbread Girl, and various versions of Gingerbread Boy/Man. I do different reading strategies with each. We compare them to see which one is our favorite and then write about it. Also, the decorated their own gingerbread man and then wrote a story to tell about how he got lost. They described him, so the reader could find him. Also, we used Little Debbie gingerbread cookies to make a prediction. Each child took one bite of their cookie. We graphed which part they ate first. Last but not least, we cook our very own gingerbread man. Our school lunch ladies help us set up this event. When we go back to get him, he has escaped. We visit about 6 different locations like the office, nurse, P.E., classrooms, and the library to follow clues. In the end, he brings us back to our room. Then we decorate him and eat! Next week as a holiday event, we will have a parent event to decorate gingerbread houses.
Love the gingerbread man!!! I have a gingerbread man story for several themes – beginning of school, Christmas, fairy tales, etc. I even wrote my own Halloween gingerbread man story this year for the students to enjoy.
My students don’t know it, but they are each getting a gingerbread man book for Christmas. 🙂
We did gingerbread in my preschool classroom last week. We made gingerbread playdough, sorted gingerbread cutouts by size, drew houses for them, and decorated cookies. We also had a gingerbread man guest in our classroom. (A gingerbread man decorative pillow from a store purchased a few years ago) The class loved that our gingerbread man was in a different learning area each day, and they were all eager to visit the learning area he was at. Our gingerbread man even took a nap on his own mini-cot!
On Friday we decorated pre-made gingerbread cookies (the children didn’t know) and we went as a class to put them in an oven (was not turned on) and then returned to our room for 10 minutes (so the cookies could “bake”). While gone our gingerbread man friend mysteriously ran away! We brushed it off. Then when we returned to get our cookies we discovered they were gone! In the oven we found a “note” or “clue” from our gingerbread man who admitted to taking the cookies and run, run, running as fast as they could. The clue led us to another classroom. We quickly went to that room but unfortunately we were too late, the cookies were already gone, but left behind another rhyming clue as to where to look for them next. Each place we searched left yet another clue. We ventured and searched, following each clue all around our school building. From the bike storage area, to the kitchen, to the receptionist at the front desk until finally we tracked them down, back to our classroom where they were waiting for us. I got many of our staff members involved which made this even more fun for the children. They’d say “our cookies ran away!!” The staff member would tell the children the cookies were there, but had already left, but left behind a new clue for us. This was definitely a BIG hit with our class, and the staff enjoyed playing along too!
Our preschool special needs classes have enjoyed the traditional Gingerbread Man as well as Jan Brett’s Gingerbread Baby and Gingerbread Friends. The students activites have included working with gingerbread playdough, making ornaments,completing following directions pages (Mailbox Teacher’s Helper), eating gingerbread cookies and creating a gingerbread man on the computer. We also are currently making a gingerbread boy stuffed with paper (idea from Mailbox) as a door decoration. Each child will complete a “gingerbread house” by the end of this week. The phrase “Run run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man” is now often heard in our classroom!
The following is one my favorite things to do with my pre-k students. I have them cut out a gingerbread man. Then they decorate it with “candy” I have cut out of the edges of post-it-notes. I take the gingerbread men and hang them in a sunny window candy side towards the glass. In their journal I have them “write” what they think will happen to the gingerbread man while he is in the window. After a few weeks I remove the gingerbread men from the window and the children remove the “candy” and discover the sun has faded the places not covered by “candy”. We discuss the results and they record this in their journal. I tape the gingerbread man into their journal. The post-it-notes make it easy to remove the “candy”.
The Gingerbread Man is a favourite of mine – we have done various activities over the years but the one that impacted the most was one where all practitioners thought showered together and came up with different ideas:
1. Decorating a gingerbread man worksheet – children then cut it out and stuck it on the board.
2. Making gingerbread men and discussing what parts the fox might have eaten first… then they pretended to be the fox and bit him – the response varied and was quite funny.
3. Making gingerbread men finger puppets to take home and share with parents.
4. Making a gingerbread man story booklet.
This was all focused on KG2 and Grade 1 students who interacted extremely well with each other. It incorporated quite a lot of areas of learning – literacy, numeracy (measuring ingredients, counting how many gingerbread men made, different), Personal, Social and emotional development as the children were all talking amongst themselves and showing different feelings… such activities have a lasting effect on the children and they learn soo much.