On the last day of our gingerbread unit we read one more gingerbread story and retold the story by putting pictures back in the correct sequence.
We also made gingerbread dough and students helped cut out their own gingerbread people. After they were done baking the students came back from specials surprised to find that their people had run away! After they caught all their gingerbread people, they got to decorate and eat their creation!
Throughout last week we compared different Gingerbread Man folktales from around the world. We also did art and math projects that supported our readings. During math we learned out to make patterns using gingerbread people and students made glyphs based on the directions I gave them.
The directions were:
- If students favorite holiday cookie was chocolate, color the gingerbread person brown
If students favorite holiday cookie was gingerbread, color the gingerbread tan
If students favorite holiday cookie was sugar, color the gingerbread yellow - If students favorite milk was chocolate, color the frosting green
If students favorite milk was strawberry, color the frosting red
If students favorite milk was plain, color the frosting blue - If the student is a boy, color the buttons blue
If the student is a girl, color the buttons pink
All last week we talked about folktales and one of my favorite folktales we talk about over the holidays, is The Gingerbread Man. So all last week we read gingerbread related folktales and did compare and contrast activities between the books.
One very unique story we read during this unit is Gingerbread Baby. In this story the gingerbread character doesn’t get eaten by the fox at the end, the little boy makes a house for the gingerbread baby! We talk about how the ending from Gingerbread Baby is different from all the other endings we’ve read. Then we make a gingerbread house art project.
On Friday to finish up our gingerbread unit we baked gingerbread men. When students came back they had ran away and the class had to find them. Once they found their gingerbread men they decorated them and ate them.
The whole week we read several different gingerbread stories and we discussed differences and similarities in the stories. We read Gingerbread Man and Gingerbread Boy and filled out a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the different characters of the stories.
On Thursday we read Gingerbread Baby and discussed how the ending is different where the Gingerbread Baby doesn’t get eaten but has a house built for him by Matti. Then we created houses for our own gingerbread babies. You can buy an updated version of this activity here.
This week we read many different gingerbread stories (Gingerbread Man, Boy, Baby, Bear, etc). The first story we read was the classic version Gingerbread Man. We retold the story using character cards and then did a cut and paste activity that showed the correct sequence of the story.
Then we brainstormed things that are scary to us and filled out a web thinking map answering things that we would run from. We then took our brainstorming, picked one thing that was the scariest and wrote about them.
The next day we looked at different ways to write the story of The Gingerbread Man. We made a list of different action verbs and then made gingerbread men with a mini verb booklet.
As we continued on with our gingerbread unit we completed math addition story problems about gingerbread men. We also made gingerbread men glyph. Finally we made / ate our own gingerbread cookies and decorated them with frosting and sprinkles.
