Gingerbread Fun!

Our Gingerbread Man unit is my absolute favorite one that we do all year!  We start out by reading "The Gingerbread Man".  Throughout the week we read different versions of the story.  "The Gingerbread Girl", "The Gingerbread Boy", "The Gingerbread Cowboy", etc.  We keep track of each version's story elements on a chart.  We compare titles, setting, characters, refrains, and endings.  It was so neat to see all the connections the kids came up with!  We had so much fun reading them.  One morning we caught our elf, Buddy, reading one of our Gingerbread books!  

Later that afternoon Buddy had a surprise for us along with a letter from Santa!  It was everything we needed to make our very own gingerbread men!  We read instructions and followed the recipe.  We each got a ball of dough and we flattened it out and used cookie cutters to cut out our gingerbread man.  

We put our cookies on the cookie sheet and sent them off to the cafeteria to be baked.  We asked the cafeteria cook to wait and cook them the next morning so that they would be ready for us to eat after lunch.  

Well you would not believe what happened the next day when we went to go get our freshly baked cookies!  They were gone!  All that was left was a few crumbs!  We thought that either someone ate them (a lot of the kids believed Coach was the culprit) or they ran off on their own.  We decided we should make some wanted posters to hang up around the school.  Take a look at our posters below!  

After we finished our posters, we walked around the school and hung them up.  We put one in the office, the cafeteria, near the library, art room, music room, and bathrooms.  When we got back into our classroom, Buddy had another surprise for us!  He had found our cookies!  

We were so excited that our gingerbread men had been found!  We couldn't wait to gobble them up!  But first we had a few things we had to do.  We graphed what part we ate first- the head, arm, leg, or tummy.  

We also did some gingerbread science.  Our essential question was why didn't the gingerbread man just swim across the river instead of getting on the fox's back.  We came up with our hypothesis and then tested it.  We put a gingerbread man in a cup of water and observed what happened.  We found out that when they cookie was in the water, it soaked it up and began to crumble.  

We had so much fun with our Gingerbread Man unit!  

Holidays Around the World

What a busy week it has been!  We visited Italy, Mexico, Germany, and Sweden all in just five days!

We learned about how Los Posados is celebrated in Mexico.  We did a shared writing about what we had learned and made poinsettias.  We also learned that boys and girls get to break piñatas during this celebration.  We were jealous! :)

We googled how to say "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"  in German.

"Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr"

We also added to our "Holiday Customs Around the World" flip book.  We have done this for every country we have studied.  

During our shared reading time this week, we have been learning about identifying problems and solutions.  We read Mooseltoe by Margie Palatini.  It is a funny story about a Moose with a giant mustache who was decorating his house for the holidays.  The problem was that he forgot all about the Christmas tree and it was Christmas Eve.  Moose wasn't able to find a tree anywhere, so he decided to be the tree!  He let his family decorate his mustache with ornaments and lights.  It was such a fun book to read!  Here is a picture of the story map that we filled in about Mooseltoe.  

On Thursday, our classroom was filled with the sweet smell of vanilla icing and gumdrops as we decorated our gingerbread houses!  

First, we had to spread the icing.  

Then, we added our candy decorations.  

They all turned out so well!  Here is a picture of our Gingerbread Village.  They couldn't wait to take them home and share them with you!  

Thank you to all our wonderful parents who sent in items for our gingerbread houses!  We are looking forward our Holiday Workshop next week!  Have a great weekend!  

Ms. Crowley :)  

Gingerbread Man

We had so much fun reading about the Gingerbread Man last week.  Here is our Gingerbread Man glyphs that we made!  We really do have "A Great Batch of Kindergartners!"  :)

We read a lot of different versions of the tale.  There was one about a gingerbread cowboy, a gingerbread pirate, and even one about a pickle!  Each day we recorded the title, characters, refrain, and ending on this class chart.  Ask your child what a refrain is!  :)

In math we made a pie graph to show which part of the cookie we bit off first.  We also recorded our data on bar graphs.

In science we read "What Do Scientist's Do?"  by Deanna Jump.  We learned that scientists ask questions, make hypotheses, test theories, record observations, and then state their conclusions.  Our essential question was "Why couldn't the Gingerbread Man cross the river on his own?"  We placed gingerbread cookies in buckets of water and observed what happened to them.  Here is what our cookies looked like after they sat in the water for a while.  

We concluded that he sank, crumbled, and got really mushy!  So we now understand why the Gingerbread Man had to climb on the fox's back!  

What a great week of Gingerbread fun!  The majority of these activities came from Deanna Jump's Gingerbread Man unit on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Thanks Deanna!