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.
This week we began our unit on gingerbread. In this unit we read many different versions of the gingerbread man folktale. We started by reading a version that resembles original Gingerbread Man story. We did a retell of the story by doing a sequence cut and paste. Then we made our own gingerbread men and write action words to complete a phrase.
The next day we read another version called Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. Students made a list of things that they would run away from if they were the gingerbread baby and wrote about it in their journals. The gingerbread man writing prompt comes from The Education Center.
We compared the characters from the story from Gingerbread Baby to the characters from Gingerbread Man using hula hoops and character cards. Then students made gingerbread houses for the gingerbread baby.
We read the story “Gingerbread Boy” and sequenced the story in the correct order of who chased after the Gingerbread boy.
We also watched another version of The Gingerbread Man on the smart board and wrote about things that we would run away from. We also made a gingerbread flip book using describing words.
