[tune: "Oh Where, Oh Where Has my Little Dog Gone?]
Oh where, oh where is the Gingerbread Baby?
Oh where, oh where has he gone?
[He pranced around the big blue bowl,]
And then re ran on and on!
Repeat the verse four times, placing the underlined words with the following phrases:
He climbed right up the garden wall
He stopped to get a drink from the well
He jumped off the bridge and onto the ice.
He jumped up and tweaked the milkman's nose.
Finish the song with this final verse:
Oh where, oh where is the Gingerbread Baby?
Oh, do you think that you know?
He clapped his hands and he ran right in
To his gingerbread house in the snow!
My Gingerbread House
I made a house of gingerbread.
It was so sugary sweet.
It took me all day long to make,
But lasted just a week!
Monday - I ate the ceiling.
Tuesday - I ate the door.
Wednesday - I ate the windows.
Thursday - I ate the floor.
Friday - I ate all four walls.
Saturday - I ate the lawn.
Sunday - I licked up the crumbs.
My gingerbread house is gone!
[ by Dotti Enderle ]
Gingerkids
[Tune: "Ten Little Indians"]
One little, two little, three little gingerkids,
four little, five little, six little gingerkids,
seven little, eight little, nine little gingerkids,
ten little gingerbread kids.
Gingerbread Man Song
[Tune: "The Muffin Man"]
Oh, do you know the Gingerbread Man,
The Gingerbread Man, the Gingerbread Man?
Oh, do you know the Gingerbread Man,
Who ran and ran and ran?
He said, "Catch me if you can,
If you can, if you can."
He said, "Catch me if you can,"
Then ran and ran and ran.
I can run like the Gingerbread Man.
The Gingerbread Man, the Gingerbread Man.
I can run like the Gingerbread Man,
Now catch me if you can.
Gingerbread Men
5 Little gingerbread men lying on a tray,
One jumped up and ran away.
Shouting, "Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can ...
I run really fast, I'm a gingerbread man!"
4 little gingerbread men lying on a tray,
One jumped up and ran away.
Shouting, "Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can ...
I run really fast, I'm a gingerbread man!"
3 little gingerbread men lying on a tray,
One jumped up and ran away.
Shouting, "Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can ...
I run really fast, I'm a gingerbread man!"
2 little gingerbread men lying on a tray,
One jumped up and ran away.
Shouting, "Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can ...
I run really fast, I'm a gingerbread man!"
1 little gingerbread man lying on a tray,
One jumped up and ran away.
Shouting, "Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can ...
I run really fast, I'm a gingerbread man!"
No more gingerbread men lying on a tray,
They all jumped up and ran away.
Oh, how I wish they had stayed with me to play.
Next time I'll eat them before they run away.
Five Little Gingerbread Men
by Gail Nettles
One little gingerbread man, lonely and blue,
Met another lonely friend and then there were two.
Two little gingerbread men happy as could be
Found one hiding, and that made three.
Three little gingerbread men running to the store
There they bought another one and that made four.
Four little gingerbread men feeling so alive
Rounded up another, and that made five.
Five little gingerbread men having lots of fun.
Better get back home now that dinner is done.
Reading:
After reading The Gingerbread Boy by Richard Egielski and The Cajun Gingerbread Boy by Berthe Amoss, discuss how the stories are alike and how they are different.
Reading Eric Kimmel's The Gingerbread Man . Have students sequence the order of the characters' appearance in the story.
Gingerbread Sight Word Game
Reproduce a gingerbread boy cutout or use a Carson-Dellosa notepad. Laminate to make sturdy and durable. Hot glue the cutout to a jumbo craft stick or ruler. Pass the gingerbread boy around the circle while playing music. When the music stops, the child with the gingerbread man has to read the next dolch sight word in the stack of words. [ Correlation: What sense do we use when we read and recognize words? Sense of sight. What sense are we using when we listen for the music to stop? Sense of hearing.]
Gingerbread Chant for Pocket Chart
Use the following predictable frame to create a fun reading center chant.
Write the chant on sentence strips and add to pocket chart. Write each child's name on a sentence strip (cut appropriately to fit). Let children practicing "reading" the chant as they pick differen't classmates' names to go in the chant.
They love doing this!
"Stop, Stop! said ( student name here ).
But the Gingerbread Man said:
"Run, run, as fast you can,
You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"
"Who Stole the Cookies?" chant
Program the words to the song, "Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?" onto sentence strips. Using the same idea as the one above, add this poem to the reading center pocket chart with students' names on gingerbread cookie patterns. Let the children practice reading the chant during center time.
Laminate the leftover 'frame' from an Ellison die cut gingerbread man. Hot glue the frame to a ruler or paint stick. Let the children use them as reading frames to "frame" and read the words around the room. My class specifically practices their dolch sight words that are in the reading center pocket chart.
Alphabet Matching Games
Program gingerbread man notepads with uppercase letters and lowercase letters. Use large notepad (or large construction paper cutout) for the uppercase letters and smaller notepad (or construction paper cutout) for the lowercase letters.
Beginning Sound Matching Games
Program one gingerbread cutout with the initial consonant or vowel. Program another gingerbread cutout with a picture of something that begins with that sound. Match the gingerbread cutouts.
Cute Kid-Made Gingerbread Book
Kim's Collection of Kid-Made Books #11
Act out Gingerbread Baby
Use the character masks from Jan Brett's Website to act out the story of the Gingerbread Baby.
Bring in 2 kinds of Gingerbread men cookies. (I have Keebler Holiday Gingerbread Elves and Voortman Gingerbread men.) Graph your favorite type of gingerbread cookie. Graph results on graphing pocket chart. Discuss class results.
Review knowledge of positional concepts and relationship with this hands-on activity. Use gingerbread man cutouts and gingerbread houses (CD-0842 has patterns or create your own) to act out the positional words. Example: Put your gingerbread man next to the house, one the left of the house, on top of the house, behind the house, etc.
Ordinal Gingerbread Men
Use 5 gingerbread man cutouts and staple them or glue them to nut cups or boxes. Instruct children to find the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th gingerbread men cutouts using various clues as to his identity. Variation: Hide something under the cup and have them guess which cup (using ordinal number) the item is underneath.
Cut, from construction paper, a supply of gingerbread men in different colors and sizes. Have children sort them by color and/or size.
After reading a variety of Gingerbread Man stories, have your class vote on which version of the story was the favorite.
Bring in Little Debbie gingerbread men snack cookies. Let the children unwrap them and take only 1 bite. Then say, "Freeze!" Make a class graph to show which part of the cookie they bit first. Talk about the graph finding which part had the most, the least, the same? Let them finish the cookie!
Cut a large number of tagboard Ellison Gingerbread Men (the shorter ones, about 4-5 inches tall). Allow 3 to 5 per student. Working in small groups, have students estimate and measure the following:
1. How tall is my gingerbread man? (Use jumbo marshmallows, unifix cubes, teddy bear or bunny counters to measure and find the answer.)
2. How tall is the [ choose item to measure ] (Use multiple gingerbread men to measure how tall various items are - a student, a desk, a book, the table, the pocket chart, etc.)
Math Workjob Mats
I read this idea at Victoria's KinderKorner Gingerbread Unit.
For Gingerbread Men, use either large Ellison diecuts or cut 9-inch tall Gingerbread Man shapes from light brown construction paper. Glue one cutout to each of ten sheets of 9x12 construction paper, leaving a 2-inch border at the bottom of the sheet.
In the upper left-hand corner of each sheet, write one numeral in bold black marker, numbering the sheets from one to ten. Along the bottom of each sheet, place the correct number of seasonal stickers to correspond with the number written on the page. Laminate and cut out.
Make a collection of cute items for decorating your gingerbread men, and place them in a small plastic box with a lid so they won't get lost. Use buttons, tiny seasonal erasers, small bits of ribbon or rickrack. You need 55 items in all to decorate the entire set. Store in a ziplock bag to use in math centers. Children will put the cards in numerical order and then use the items to decorate each gingerbread man card with the number of items listed at the top. (If done correctly, all the items will be used.)
Gingerbread Man Dot-to-Dot
Use a gingerbread man pattern to create a dot-to-dot activity. Glue the pattern on construction paper and laminate so that children can use and re-use this activity in the Math center.
Gingerbread Man Seriation
Put gingerbread man cutouts in order according to size.
I have a cute Carson Dellosa counting certificate from their Gingerbread Theme Series. At the end of the unit, do a rote counting assessment. Fill out the certificate telling how high the child counting to.
Writing:
Mouse Makes a Gingerbread House
This creative reading and writing booklet about a mouse and her gingerbread house will really get your class into the gingerbread unit! For each child, duplicate the booklet pages onto white construction paper. Have each child color and cut out her pages and pattern pieces, then complete each page according to the following instructions:
[ The Education Center, December Reproducible Activities, Kindergarten, TEC967]
Students dictate information to complete the following sentence. My favorite part of The Gingerbread Man (Baby, Boy, etc.)was _______________________.
Make a class book with each child's name in it, using the following writing frame:
"Stop, Stop! said ( student name here ).
But the Gingerbread Man said:
"Run, run, as fast you can,
You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"
(see Reading for another idea for this frame.)
Read The Gingerbread Man by Paul Galdone to the class. Write the following sentence on the board and ask them to give other ideas to finish the sentence.
"You can't _______ me. I'm the gingerbread man."
Examples: hurt, tackle, squash, push,
Have children copy the sentence in their journal and dictate their "new" word to you. Students will then draw a picture to illustrate.
Science:
Touch and Tell
Use a gingerbread man pattern to make several pairs of tagboard gingerbread boys. Apply a different texture (sense of touch) to each pair of cutouts. [For example, sandpaper, stretched-out cotton, aquarium gravel, felt, wrapping paper, packing bubbles, etc.]
To play: Have a child close her eyes; then give her a gingerbread boy. Place its match and an additional gingerbread boy in front of her. Encourage her to carefull feel the gingerbread boy she is holding, then feel the others to find its match. AFter she identifies the matching gingerbread boy, have her open her eyes and use her sense of sight to check her choice.
Making Homemade Gingerbread Cookies
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup shortening
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 cups plain flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
3/4 tsp. cloves
3/4 tsp. ginger
Preheat the oven to 375. Combine and mix the first four ingredients in a large bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well to form a dough. Roll the dough onto a sheet of waxed paper. Cut the dough with gingerbread man cookie cutters; then place the cookies two inches appart on a greased cookie sheet. Bake the cookies 10-12 minutes. After the cookies cool, have each child use tube icing to decorate a cookie as desired. Then invite him to enjoy the sense of taste by eating his cookie.
Make a Five Senses graph to compile information on from the making cookie experience. Divide the chart into 5 columns:
Touch...Taste...Sight...Hearing...Smell
Gingerbread Man Body Part Game
Make a spinner divided into a specific body part of the gingerbread man. Make body part cards (enough for the number of players) with specific body part on it.
In a small group setting have children spin one at a time. As the spinner lands on a specific body part, the child names the body part and picks it from a pile of body part pieces. Each child continues until he has "built his gingerbread man."
Act like a Gingerbread Man! game
Use a set of cards where each gingerbread man is pointing to a specific part of his body. He is acting out a certain position. Put cards in a stack and in a small group setting, each child turns a card over and names the body part the gingerbread man is touching. The child then imitates the gingerbread man's position.
Gingerbread's Four Seasons
Working with a partner, complete the game board by putting all the pictures showing summer gingerbread men in the summer row and so forth.
Field Trip to a bakery.
Arts & Crafts:
As a homework assignment, send home a plain gingerbread cutout from posterboard or tagboard. Let the students decorate them with their family in any creative way they want.Display them outside classroom or on a bulletin board.
Trace a large gingerbread pattern onto tagboard. Tear small pieces of different colored construction paper and have children glue them to the figure.
Gingerbread Man Puzzle
Using the gingerbread man pattern from [Lollipops, Issue 97, 1999, p. 6], have children add features and decorate. Each child does a gingerbread man and decorates as desired. Cut each gingerbread into several puzzle pieces. Keep the pieces in an envelope with the child's name on it. Pass the puzzles around and see if each student can work all the puzzles. As they complete one, have them write their own name on the envelope.
Sandpaper Gingerbread Men
Make gingerbread men from sandpaper using a large Ellison diecut. (Don't use your good scissors!) Sprinkle with cinnamon, rub with a cinnamon stick, or spray with cinnamon room freshener. make icing using colored glue.
Gingerbread Man Ornaments
Make dough from applesauce, adding enough cinnamon to thciken it into a thick paste. Press flat, about 1/8-inch thick. cut with a cookie cutter, and use a straw to punch a hole near the top. Lay flat to dry on wax paper. (Takes several days.) Glue on decorations, if desired. Hang with shiny red ribbon.
Purchase a box of gingerbread mix. (Dromedary is the best!) Make the dough according to package directions. Using a gingerbread cookie cutter, let each child cut out a gingerbread man for snacktime.
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~ Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy ~ 
Books:
Writing:
