The Gingerbread Man

Are you looking for secular winter curriculum? The Gingerbread Man is a classic tale and the perfect theme for December. With plenty of great literature lesson tie-ins, preschool and elementary students will love learning with The Gingerbread Man!

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Whether you’re homeschooling and not ready for a full blown Christmas theme or teaching in a secular school, The Gingerbread Man is a great book to ease into the month of December. My favorite version is illustrated by Karen Schmidt and available here (at time of writing it is only $3.99 for the paperback!).

This is the book that I’ve based my The Gingerbread Man packet on (available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store)

The packet is perfect for emerging readers. It features story sequencing cards in both color and black and white, vocabulary from the story and a cute gingerbread person template.

The-Gingerbread-Man-Sequencing-Packet-Cover

Emerging Readers

As I mentioned, The Gingerbread Man is an excellent story for new readers. The repetition and rhyming of “Run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t catch me. I’m the gingerbread man.” make for a wonderful place to begin a literature lesson. After initially reading the book aloud, you could review rhyming words, beginning with those from the story (can and man). Using the photos from the packet, the students can begin to practice their story sequencing skills. I would laminate the pictures and then attach felt or magnets to the back for display. If you have a larger class (versus homeschooling) then you could just assign each child a picture. Thanks to the built in repetition in the story, students should easily be able to remember the rhyming chant while they work to retell the book in the correct order.

Once the pictures are in the correct sequence, students can use the included vocabulary words and match them to the correct picture. More advanced readers could just use the words instead of the pictures for their sequencing activity.

Preschool Activities with The Gingerbread Man

Are your students not quite ready for rhyming and story sequencing? Do you need more activities’ to round out the packet? Fear not! I’ve got some more great gingerbread man themed ideas ahead.

Math

When I originally did this curriculum with my youngest I found this excellent activity. The activity includes the rhyme “Five Little Gingerbread Men” and cute little gingerbread people. I printed and laminated them before adding magnets to the backs. Then as you read the rhyme aloud (counting down from 5 to 1 along the way) you can have the children remove a gingerbread person from a real cookie sheet!

For more math activities you can use big buttons like these to sort by color or use as counters. (As always be aware of choking hazards for the age group you are working with.) New! Use my one to one button counting worksheet after counting the buttons in the hands on activity!

Science

Make or purchase gingerbread cookies and see what happens when you add them to water! (Baking is always an excellent way to do some science or math, but if you’re short on time store bought is just as great for this activity).

-Have the students use their five senses to describe the cookies. Good scientists make a lot of observations!

-Make a hypothesis. What will happen if the cookies are put into a bowl of water? Will they sink or float? Will they dissolve? Be sure to discuss the results after you finish the experiment. The students may need to use their five senses again to write down some new observations!

Emotional/Social Skills

Gingerbread men are an excellent theme for a lesson in social skills. You can use the template included in my packet and pre-make several gingerbread men with varying facial expressions. Ask the students what the cookie people are feeling, why do they think that? You can also pass out blank templates to the students and ask them to draw how they are feeling that day.

Another choice would be to re-read The Gingerbread Man and ask the students to draw or make the faces of how they feel at certain parts of the story. How does The Gingerbread Man feel when he is escaping? What about when he’s talking to the fox? How do the other characters feel after the fox eats the cookie?!

Motor Skills

Make gingerbread scented playdough! Here’s a great recipe that I’ve found. Using playdough is great for fine motor skills. You can also continue the social-emotional lesson from above and have the students use different materials to create faces on play-dough gingerbread people.

This may be obvious, but you can make gingerbread houses! Squeezing frosting out of a piping bag and placing the small candies around the house are more great ways to practice those fine motor skills. This may require a lot of help depending on the age of your students, but its worth the effort!

A third activity is for gross motor skills- using the rhyme from story, change out the action word. Have the children stand up and get moving as you encourage them not only to “Run, run as fast as they can.” but also to skip, walk, jump, etc.

Winter classroom decorations on Amazon

What do you think? Are there any more activities to add to my gingerbread theme? New to homeschooling and looking for more ways to include preschoolers and younger children? Check out my post on that here!

Rhyming (an) words worksheet on TPT