Gingerbread Baby

We enjoy reading "The Gingerbread Baby" by Jan Brett around this time of year and doing gingerbread activities.

This year we used graham crackers, frosting, mini candy canes, and sprinkles to make a gingerbread house.  Our houses never work real well with this method unless I use a glue gun to put the pieces together before hand, but I was going for things we already had in our house.  I didn't use a glue gun before hand and we opted for a flat top house once it kept falling apart on us.  My son still had a blast with the sprinkles (as you can see).

Another different activity we did is making a large gingerbread boy.  I actually wanted to make one just my son's size, but we were a little short on the brown butcher paper so he is a bit smaller.  You could use construction paper to glue or tape eyes, nose, buttons and so forth on.  However, anytime that I can get my son to color or draw and do it happily that is what we go with.

All of my other Gingerbread Activities I have shared before.  You can check out loads of links from posts I have done in the past.

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

As you can see I have been doing gingerbread stuff since before my current preschool was around. :)

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:

Gingerbread boy and girl coloring pages

Gingerbread Counting Game

Five Gingerbread Song with freebie

Another virtual gingerbread house 

My gingerbread post from 2012

My gingerbread post from 2011

My gingerbread post from 2010

My gingerbread post from 2009

Gingerbread Activities

One of our annual activities this time of year is reading Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and doing activities to go along with it.  She also has another gingerbread themed book called Gingerbread Friends. The first stop to make is to Jan Brett's website.  She has coloring pages, videos, and other activities to go along with all of her books and she even has some visuals you can print off to go with the Gingerbread Baby.

One of our favorite activities is making gingerbread men ornaments to hang on the tree.  You can do them any shape, but the brown color makes them look gingerbread like.  Mix together 1 1/2 cups of cinnamon, 1 cup of applesauce and 1/3 cup glue.  Roll it out and cut out your shapes.  Place them on a cooling rack and allow them to cool for 24 hours.  I always do it the day before we read the book.

 I have noticed the more you play with it the smoother it looks.  You can see cracks in my shape because this was one of the first ones I cut out.  Don't forget to put a hole somewhere if you are wanting to hang it on the tree!

 I like to buy glitter glue to use on these fellows.  It is way less messy than regular glitter and good fine motor practice.

Here are some of the gingerbread men we made.   They are drying and will be put on the tree tomorrow.

We also enjoy decorating cookies.  However, since none of my kids or husband like gingerbread cookies that much I usually make sugar cookies to decorate.

The other big thing we make are gingerbread houses.  At the end of this story the main character makes a gingerbread house for the baby to live in so we make our own too.  We did a little village I found on sale this year, but I found this graham cracker house with directions I would like to try sometime.  

We also did some other gingerbread related activities.

Here is a link to a coloring page of a gingerbread man and one of a gingerbread girl.

There is a couple of coloring page packets here and one of them has a gingerbread house.

We've also enjoyed Homeschool Creations Gingerbread Baby Lap book (although I haven't put it together as a lap book) Here are a couple of activities from there.

Here is a file folder gingerbread matching game.

Here is a fun gingerbread house word hunt

Gingerbread Counting Game

Virtual gingerbread house #1 and #2

You can also check out my previous gingerbread posts.  2011, 2010, 2009

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Gingerbread Baby

We read "Gingerbread Baby" by Jan Brett today.  We have been doing this story with activities since my oldest was nearly 2 (he is about to turn 6).  I try to do one or two different things each year, but they enjoy the core activities so I don't go away from that too much.  In fact, I had to reassure my oldest that we would save the most exciting activities for after he was home from kindergarten.

This year I found a fun Gingerbread Baby Printable Pack by Homeschool Creations.  It included a lot of fun activities including this pattern game, as well as some other fun things.

 This is a little game that I made a while back.  Match the baby gingerbread with the larger gingerbread.

 This year I found some gingerbread marshmallows at the store so we used our larger gingerbread men and my son put the right amount of marshmallows on each man.

 We always decorate gingerbread people to hang on our tree. Click here for the recipe.

 We also make cookies.  We have made gingerbread cookies in the past and no one is a huge fan of them so we make sugar cookies instead.  Then we decorate them.

 The gingerbread house tends to be the main event of the day.  We added one of the gingerbread marshmallows in front of the house so our gingerbread baby could have a house, just like in the book.

Here is a fun file folder matching game.

Jan Brett's website also is a must see for activities for all of her books.  It includes a virtual gingerbread house and some fun videos.

If you are interested in seeing what we've done in previous year's you can check out 2010's here and 2009's here.

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