When the month of December hits, it can be hard to keep our students engaged in learning. They are so excited about the upcoming holiday season and two or more weeks off of school! Who can blame them? Teachers are too! It can be a tough time of year to teach so I like to incorporate some fun, holiday-related themes into our learning in December. This blog post is all about our gingerbread unit. With these gingerbread-themed activities, you could have a gingerbread theme day or week! Keep reading for fun gingerbread activities for your first graders and second graders!
Should you have a gingerbread day?
Absolutely! The last week before winter break is the perfect time to add themed fun to your lesson plans. Let’s be honest—how much focused learning will your students do that last week of school? Meeting your students at their excitement level by incorporating something new and fun, like a gingerbread day, is a great way to keep them engaged while still covering important skills. It’s also a nice way to send them off before winter break with a memorable, fun experience. So, why not add some gingerbread fun to your plans and start the countdown to the holiday break with excitement and creativity?
You can find all of these activities in our Gingerbread Unit.
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Our Favorite Books For Gingerbread Activities
Here is a list of 3 gingerbread men books we use for our gingerbread unit. An affiliate link is included for each one. Read our disclosure here.
- The Gingerbread Man Loose In The School by Laura Murray
- The Gingerbread Man by Gail Yerrill
- The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst
These books each offer a unique twist on the classic gingerbread story and are fantastic for sparking discussion about characters, setting, and plot. Other favorite gingerbread stories include:
- The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett
- The Gingerbread Cowboy by Janet Squires
- The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup
- Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett
- How To Catch A Gingerbread Man by Adam Wallace
These books are perfect for incorporating a variety of fun, holiday-related themes into your December lessons. Whether you’re focusing on sequencing, comparing and contrasting, or creative writing, these gingerbread books offer endless possibilities!
Retelling Our Favorite Gingerbread Books
I love to incorporate retelling and sequencing activities when reading gingerbread picture books, as these skills are key components of early literacy. Our gingerbread unit is built around engaging story retells for the books listed above, making it both fun and educational for young readers. After reading the story aloud, students work on sequencing by gluing pictures in the correct order, helping them to understand the flow of events. This hands-on activity reinforces comprehension and helps students practice identifying the beginning, middle, and end of a story.
To support this, we use picture cards to retell the story as a class first. This collaborative retelling allows students to hear and participate in summarizing the story’s main events before they work independently. It also encourages rich discussion, builds oral language skills, and fosters a sense of accomplishment as students work together to remember important details. After the class retell, students are more confident and ready to complete the sequencing task on their own.
These activities not only help develop sequencing skills but also provide a fun and interactive way for students to engage with the text. Retelling the story in multiple ways ensures that students internalize the narrative structure, which supports both comprehension and memory retention.
Comparing and Contrasting Gingerbread Stories
After reading the three different versions of gingerbread stories, students compare and contrast the different books. Although each story centers around the familiar theme of a runaway gingerbread character, there are notable differences in plot, characters, and outcomes that make each version unique.
Although each story features a gingerbread character, they have unique twists in terms of plot, characters, and resolution. For example, while The Gingerbread Man follows the traditional tale of a runaway cookie who gets outwitted by a fox, The Gingerbread Girl introduces a clever twist where the gingerbread girl outsmarts the fox and escapes. The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School takes an even more modern approach, with a gingerbread man racing through the school in search of his class.
By comparing and contrasting the stories, students practice critical thinking while analyzing the similarities and differences in characters, settings, and themes. They also develop a deeper understanding of story structure and learn how different authors can take the same basic idea and create something entirely new.
Gingerbread Man Reading Activities
Ready to get your December bulletin board ready? This story elements craft will look perfect on your bulletin boards all month long! Read any gingerbread man book of your choosing and then students assemble their gingerbread houses. With this gingerbread house, they will write and draw the main character, the setting, the problem, the solution, the supporting characters, and their favorite part.
Graphing Gingerbread Men Activities
This activity includes graphing and a fun craft, which would also make a great bulletin board display for December! This day might be your students’ favorite because they get to eat gingerbread cookies! Bring in gingerbread men cookies and students will graph which part they eat first. Will it be the head? Leg? Arm? Time to find out! As a class, graph which part students ate first and then create your gingerbread boy craft.
This is a fun way to further practice the 1st grade math standard: 1.MD.C.4: Organize, represent, and interpret data with up to three categories; ask and answer questions about the total number of data points, how many in each category, and how many more or less are in one category than in another.
Gingerbread Man Math Games
Ready to practice math skills with a gingerbread twist? These math games include math skills: addition within 20, subtraction within 20, doubles, and doubles plus one.
Persuasive Writing Activity
Have you ever thought that gingerbread men don’t want to be eaten? December is a tough time for them! As a class, brainstorm ways a gingerbread man could avoid being eaten. Think about what he could disguise himself as. This is activity you could either send home or do in class. If doing in class, make sure to get a lot of different materials like: construction paper, stickers, glue, glitter, pipe cleaners, toothpicks, etc.
Gingerbread Write The Room Activities
December is typically the time when we are working on digraphs. This write the room activity is differentiated to meet your students needs. Hang the cards around the room and students walk around to determine the correct digraph to match the picture.
Here is how the sheets are differentiated to meet your students needs:
- Level 1: Students have 2 different digraphs listed. They must color in the correct one.
- Level 2: Students write in the correct digraph. This sheet includes a “digraph bank” for students to use and then cross out the digraph after it’s used.
- Level 3: Students write in the correct digraph to read the complete word.
Creative Writing
Here are a few different ways to add some writing activities to your gingerbread week:
The Missing Gingerbread Man: My favorite gingerbread story is The Gingerbread Man Loose In The School. Have your students create a missing poster for him! Oh no, where did he go?! They draw the missing poster picture and then write below what the gingerbread man looks like, where he was last seen, where he could’ve ran off to, etc. This is your little learners chance to be creative with their writing!
How To Catch A Gingerbread Man: Write a story of how you would catch the gingerbread man.
Change The Ending: We all know in the original story of The Gingerbread Man, the fox eats the gingerbread man! Now your students can change the ending. How does the gingerbread man escape the fox?
Design A Gingerbread House
This activity is not included in our unit; however, my son’s first grade class created gingerbread houses at their winter party last year. They were each given a milk carton (the milk cartons from the cafeteria… they were washed out), graham crackers, frosting, and different candies. Then, they used all their materials to create a gingerbread house! I thought this was a great way to incorporate gingerbread house building, without actually building one because let’s be honest, building a gingerbread house with just the graham crackers and frosting is difficult!
Take gingerbread house building to the next level by having students work in groups to design a gingerbread village! Each group can be responsible for creating one building, such as a school, a shop, or a house, and then come together to form a whole gingerbread village. You can use graham crackers, icing, and candy, or if you want a more low-maintenance project, students can draw and design their gingerbread houses on paper. This is a fun way to build community and teamwork in your classroom among your students.
Gingerbread Man STEM Challenge
After reading one of the gingerbread stories, challenge students to design a trap to catch the gingerbread man before he runs away. They can brainstorm different ideas, sketch their designs, and build their traps using materials provided. Once the traps are built, have students explain how their trap works and why they think it would be successful in catching the gingerbread man. This activity encourages creativity, problem-solving, and engineering design principles.
Different materials to use: Paper, cardboard, scissors, tape, string, pipe cleaners, and small objects like buttons or toothpicks.
Our Gingerbread Man Unit
Interested in these gingerbread man activities? We have them all ready for you in our gingerbread unit. Plan your gingerbread week with our comprehensive unit!
Click here to purchase on TPT.
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