Gingerbread activities are some of my favorite holiday activities. There are so many great ideas out there that will keep your learners engaged during the craziness of the holiday season. If you know me, I love all things literacy so creating engaging gingerbread literacy activities was so easy and fun!
Gingerbread Books
I love reading various versions of the Gingerbread Man. My students love pointing out the differences in each book. But my favorite book that I read every year is The Gingerbread Man retold by Louise Martin and illustrated by Gail Yerril.
This book gave me the inspiration for my Gingerbread Thematic unit. It’s a literacy based unit (with a little bit of STEM!) that focuses on retelling the story of that clever gingerbread man! In this unit, you can use the character images to retell the story.
Retelling Activity
There are various ways to use these character images. You can tape popsicle sticks on the back of each one and assign a student to a character. A second idea is adding felt or velcro to the back of each character to model retelling stories.
Also included with these gingerbread literacy activities is a set of story puppets for your students to hold a reader’s theater or practice retelling with a partner.
As a quick assessment, assign your students this story map to fill out! They can even use the story puppets to help them as they fill out each box.
Not a Gingerbread Project
You spent the week studying all the versions of The Gingerbread Man. Your students loved working on retelling skills along with all the other activities that are in my Gingerbread Thematic Unit.
We end our unit with a Not a Gingerbread project that I send home over the weekend. Students use their creative minds to disguise the gingerbread man so he doesn’t get eaten! We spend the last half of the day before our long holiday break sharing our disguised gingerbread men!
How many different disguises can your students come up with??! You can grab my FREE Not a Gingerbread template by clicking the download link below!
