Gingerbread Fun

Ah, the almost cool weather is here.  This is my favorite time of year!  I love the slightly cooler temperatures, and the thoughts of winter (we don't really have winter in Florida so it's just the thoughts).  Since it doesn't feel like winter I like to do activities that remind me of winter and Christmas. 

What is more Christmassy than Gingerbread cookies?  One of my favorite Authors, Jan Brett, has a few books about a little Gingerbread Baby, and about Gingerbread Friends.  I love the stories and the illustrations.  We re-read these time and time again every year. We will also include many others gingerbread boy or girl books this month.  Stay tuned for more books.
Books so far this week were:

If anyone is interested, you can go to her page to print out masks, or other coloring pages for your children to use.  Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby page  She has other resources as well on her page: www.Janbrett.com

We began with our  gingerbread activities this week.  We used gingerbread man upper case and lower case alphabet matching, and gingerbread girl and gingerbread house upper case and lower case alphabet matching.  The gingerbread boy upper/lower case matching was from TPT as well. The Gingerbread Alphabet Freebie house/girl match was from TPT.  Most of the children did pretty well matching all of them, but they were more enthusiastic about it when paired with a friend, divide the cards in half, and GO!  Everything is more fun as a game and with a friend.

We also included some basic dot to dot gingerbread men in sleeves.  One of the dot to dots was lower case alphabet a to u, the other was numbers from 1 to 45.  We included a sheet from Gingerbread Baby story to fill in the first letter - they were all things included in the story. 

One activity I have used for years is from cut out gingerbread men in red and green.  They are to match the feeling faces on the red and green gingerbread men.  They also have numbers on one leg so we can also use them with buttons or something similar to count out the right number of buttons for decoration.  

A fun gingerbread rhyme is a must, so we included Five Yummy Gingerbread in our story time, then had it available for use during centers or play time.  They don't completely know the rhyme yet but they are saying a little bit of it and enjoying working with the gingerbread men stuck on the felt board. The Five Yummy Gingerbread I found on Teacher's Notebook.  The link to the site is: Five Yummy Gingerbread poem and Roll and Graph

To pass our waiting times for bathroom turn, we added Gingerbread Visual Discrimination games.  One is cut apart and on the wall for matching, the other is little cards that they have to find the two that match on each card.

Just now while checking the links I found a fun Gingerbread Gross Motor game we can add to our activities.  I think they will really like this one.  It combines movement and learning about verbs/action words.

The menu for Monday and Tuesday was:
Monday:  Breakfast: Banana, Multigrain Cheerios, Milk
                Lunch:  Cheese Lasagna, Green Beans, Tomato Sauce, Milk
                Snack: Yogurt, Banana
Tuesday: Breakfast: Plums, Multigrain Cheerios, Milk
               Lunch: Cowboy Stew, Carrots, Bread, Milk
               Snack: Banana, Crackers