Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Gingerbread Activities for Preschoolers and Up

We have been doing gingerbread activities and today we wrapped up the activities!
The first thing I did was read "The Gingerbread Baby" by Jan Brett to my preschooler.  There are lots of versions of "The Gingerbread Boy" out there.  I think this one about a gingerbread baby is quite fun. Jan Brett has a website with lots of fun activities to go along with this book and her other books including this virtual gingerbread house. There are also some videos on her site of her reading the book and talking about it and making some gingerbread cookies!

On Monday I posted a recipe for gingerbread men ornaments.  You can find it here
Since they were dry and ready to decorate we did that together with all 3 of my boys.  I like to use glitter glue that you can find in the art supply part of most stores.
It is fun to watch each year how more independent my kids get at decorating there own ornaments.
Something else we did last night with the older brothers was decorate gingerbread men.  Some years I will make cookies and/or we will decorate gingerbread houses.  This year I found some giant gingerbread men at Costco and thought they'd be perfect. 
 The boys really enjoyed doing that.  They didn't fall apart on them and aside from the frosting they were able to all decorate by themselves. They all look so cute and they had fun doing them.
Today while my older kids were at school I did things with my youngest geared toward preschool.  We love Homeschool Creation's Gingerbread Baby Pack because it goes right along with the story we read
This Gingerbread Man Pack also has a great collection of activities.  My son enjoyed doing a few of those.
He also did this cut and paste activity which is great with working on shapes.
We had  fun doing this matching game as well.  It is actually a file folder game, but when I made it a few years ago my oldest wanted it to be a regular matching game.
I made up this matching game a few years ago.  There is a large gingerbread that needs to find the match to the small one.  You match the number on their bellies to the right one.  I like to pretend the big one is the mom and the little one is the baby.
I didn't want to do a real gingerbread house, but I thought one out of cardboard would be fun so I found a box and made it into a house.  It is kind of a strange shape, but it works.  I let my son paint on it.  I thought he'd really go to town on it, but he decided to just paint the top white so it looked like it was covered with snow.  We also cut out a door so he could use one of the ornaments to play with in and out of the house.
Here is a link to another idea for a cardboard gingerbread house.
We also took turns hiding the gingerbread man and finding him.  We did that many times and it was lots of fun to see how quickly my son could find it and then the ideas of where he came up of places to hide it.

Here are some other gingerbread links:

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