Gingerbread Week

My kids enjoyed preschool co-op’s Gingerbread Week  so much that it turned into gingerbread month!

The kids loved the gingerbread books we read:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our focus letter was G. For our capital G the kids used stencils (part of a bulletin board border that I cut up) and painted with cotton balls. We decorated our lowercase g with gold glitter glue. Here’s a G is for Gingerbread Handwriting Worksheet.

During circle time we looked at the illustrations in our gingerbread books to compare and contrast gingerbread characters. We noticed that lots of gingerbread men have buttons, so we made a graph of how many buttons we were wearing at the time. Even the two year olds were into the graphing activity- each kid stood up for  us to count their buttons and then I handed them a gingerbread man with that number written on it. We assembled the graph all together and then talked about who had the most/least buttons, etc.

Under the graph you can see our scented gingerbread men. The kids liked trying to match the different spices. We found that several of them do not like the smell of nutmeg!

We laced and stuffed gingerbread characters. This was super affordable since we used paper bags, yarn, a hole punch and markers.

Ryan loved making a gingerbread family garland (again just out of a paperbag). I love how the second one has “Grandma’s fluffy gray hair”.

Both kids loved making life-size gingerbread friends!

 

All of the preschoolers enjoyed our gingerbread poem and making gingerbread puppets to re-enact the story. Since my kids like to climb in the oven of their play kitchen they’ve loved acting out all of the different versions of the story.

I found an adorable new blog, Musings of Me,  that has tons of cute Gingerbread printables! Here’s Ella sorting buttons onto her gingerbread color cards.

My kids loved creating Gingerbread Applesauce Ornaments to give a few special people for Christmas. The dough was 1 cup of applesauce, 1 cup of cinnamon, and 2T of glue. I was surprised that it actually made a great dough (not crumbly, and super yummy smelling). It took several days for our ornaments to dry. The kids put a lot of time and effort into decorating them!

   

Of course on the first morning of preschool, Homeschool Creations just had to post a Gingerbread Lapbook and send me into a printing, cutting and laminating tizzy before school started! (Thanks ;)

Since somehow they aren’t totally sick of the gingerbread  theme yet we worked on this mini-book, My Gingerbread Man. And, we played the Gingerbread Man game on Starfall!

It’s been a fun & yummy smelling month :)