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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