Gingerbread Week Day 1

It's Gingerbread Week in our classroom, yippee!

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of extra time to do bunches and bunches of gingerbread lessons and cute craftivities. We aren't doing an anthology story this week, so I can use that time. For anything else, I'm trying to integrate the best I can.

For instance, we integrated gingerbread into our math lesson today. We've been working on fact families, so I figured we could make gingerbread houses with fact families written on them. I lucked out and noticed that Mrs. Hodson from Today in First Grade ... had a great fact family house freebie! One less thing to do for me. Gotta love that!

I copied her house onto brown construction paper. It was a lighter shade of brown and they looked fabulous. Next, I knew I wanted to add candies to the houses, but I hadn't made up my mind on how we would do it. So, I decided to check out Jan Brett's website because I knew it is full of great pictures and ideas.

Lo and behold, I found exactly what I wanted. Not only did she have candies for our houses, but she also had these super adorable gingerbread friends!

Click {here} to go to the Jan Brett Gingerbread Friends page.

Here's how our Gingerbread Village turned out. I had one little cutie still out sick so you'll notice a spot left for her.

The kids were so proud of themselves! {me too!}

Later in the afternoon, we read the Gingerbread Man. I asked if anyone remembered the story of the Gingerbread Man. They told me what they remembered {which was pretty good} and we went over the GIANT Anchor Chart we were going to complete as we read the different gingerbread stories this week. Got this from Deanna Jump's Gingerbread Unit. It's super cute, go get it now!

I reminded them that as I read the story they had a job to do. They needed to recall the characters, refrain, and ending of the story so we could put it on the chart. I read the story to them and they loved it, of course.

The kids gave me the answers for the anchor chart and I added them on.

Afterwards, I read Deanna Jump's Gingerbread story to the class. It is short and sweet and the kids loved the rhyming. Then, I showed them our big ole pocket chart with the same story all mixed up. We worked on ways to put the story back in order. They SO wanted to look at the book to help them figure it out. I told them we would look at the book after we tried to sequence it on our own. They didn't like that answer, ha!

Alas, they did it {without the book!}

One of my kids asked me to take a picture of it. I guess they are really used to me taking pictures of them by now. They want to document everything!

Here you go, buddy!

Can't wait for Day 2 fun tomorrow!