December -- Gingerbread Men, The Nutcracker, and Nativity (Part 1)

 For the month of December in grades TK-2, I focused on Gingerbread Men. The library has so many different versions of the story, and I have always loved gingerbread men. One of my former kindergarten students who is now an excellent teacher herself, still remembers the Gingerbread Man unit we did in kindergarten. Unfortunately her memory of the unit is not all positive, but I made restitution, and we're good now! 

So on to this year! I did not have many days to teach because of Book Fair and Christmas Break. I was able to read one gingerbread man book to each of the grades and have them do a STEM activity after the book. I have listed the activities for each grade below. The books I used are pictured at the bottom of this post; for the most part; I actually used the same book for TK and kindergarten but did different activities. 

TK -- I read Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby. One of the objectives that the TK classes are working on is positional words. For Christmas I gave them individually wrapped Little Debbie gingerbread men. Before eating them, the kids had to use them in their activity! I gave them each a laminated gingerbread house and called out directions for where to place their cookie in relation to the house. ("Put your gingerbread man beside the house." etc.) They had so much fun, and I could immediately see if anyone had trouble following the directions. 

Kindergarten -- Same book. I gave each of the kids a small gingerbread man eraser about an inch tall. (I bought a big bag of these from Amazon and will be able to reuse them in the future.) They used Legos to build a new home for the Gingerbread Baby, kind of like his gingerbread house in the book. They had lots of fun with it, but I forgot to take pictures!

First Grade -- I read How to Catch a Gingerbread Man. This was such a fun book; the kids and I all enjoyed it! After the book, I assigned them to different tables where they did one of four activities: as a group, use large wooden blocks to build a bridge for our large gingerbread man to go on across the river; use Legos to build a boat for a gingerbread man eraser to ride on across the river; use Magnatiles to build a house for a gingerbread man eraser; use tower builders to build a tower for the gingerbread man eraser to hid in/on. They had lots of fun and were so creative!

Second Grade -- I read The Gingerbread Boy. With second grade, I decided to start working on coding offline. I designed a card (attached) with obstacles from the book. The kids had to work in a group to decide which directions to move their gingerbread man eraser through the obstacles to get home. They also had individual recording sheets where they kept track of his movements. By the the third and final second grade class, I had learned how to give them directions to best help them complete the activity. (Don't you hate it when that happens?!) I do think that they all learned from it though and plan to do more activities like this.   Click here for printable activity.

I don't know who learned more from these Gingerbread Man activities, me or the kids. I know that I have a long way to go, especially in the STEM area. I am reading everything I can get my hands on, combing the internet for ideas, and creating like crazy. I am also doing my best to support the teachers in their classrooms as they try to incorporate more STEM activities. As strange as it sounds, I am energized by the reading, combing, creating, and supporting. With the close of 2024 and the start of 2025, I still LOVE BEING A LIBRARIAN!