Gingerbread Fun and a Hanukkah Thinking Map

We have been having a great time with The Gingerbread Man story. This is the cover of the version I have been reading.  It has a little different ending where the fox tricks the Gingerbread man by telling him he can't hear him and to come closer.  Of course, you know the rest! 
We discussed and reviewed story elements:  character, setting, problem, and solution using this book. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students remembered these concepts!

We have also made a Gingerbread man glyph.  Students colored eyes to match eye color, counted out buttons to show age, and used yellow or green yarn to show gender.

Gingerbread Man Glyph

The dark brown men were done by the AM group and the light brown men were done by the PM group.

This was the writing activity done to follow up the glyph project.

(I have more than 24 students.  A few children did not get to make a gingerbread man.)

 When the students arrived in the morning, they were all a buzz and counting the gingerbread men on the wall.  Some were trying to see how many students have blue eyes.  Some were trying to determine the number of boys and girls. Charting the class totals was on the day's agenda, but originally not intended to be the first activity!

We still have some more activities planned for this story.  Next month, we'll get some Social Studies by learning about other holiday traditions such as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.  


TEACHERS:  I have had at least two of you request a Hanukkah Thinking Map so I am sharing this.  You need to download both parts separately. Sorry.  

Hanukkah Facts page is found here.
The Hanukkah Thinking Map is found here. 

I hope you find these useful!

 

Thanksgiving Activities... Continued

Here is the second version of the giant turkey.  The wings are painted with colorful dots.  

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This interactive writing activity was done from the perspective of a turkey.  Students helped to generate sentences and helped with most of the writing.  I had to support the children in friendly letter format, as they were not familiar with this structure.

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Finally, we did some study of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  I showed a video of the first Thanksgiving from the Discovery Education site to create background knowledge. I reread the same Thanksgiving story. During the first reading, I realized this was a very abstract concept for the children.  Their understanding increased after viewing the video. Each child was given one of these to take home.

 

 I got this idea from  the Dollar Tree's website.  I created the Mayflower tag and added the pilgrim.  The pilgrims came from the Making Learning Fun web page. I loved how these turned out!

Thanksgiving activities

Thanksgiving is not supposed to be this fun!!  

 

We had a good time this week with these Thanksgiving activities.

     

These kids are "tickling their turkeys" with this emergent reader.

Here is a closer look.

Here are some "turkeys" who wanted to show off their head wear!

This was a cut and paste activity where students had to put the turkeys in order by 10's.

This project was my favorite!  
It is a variation of K. Miner's turkey project. I used a painted paper plate for the body and added a small tag to his wing.

But were aren't quite done yet...

Come back soon! 

 

Writing Practice for a Turkey and Pilgrim

The class needs practice with handwriting and copying a sentence with finger spacing .  We have been writing sentences this past week. The coloring pages are from K. Miner and DLTK.

 We also studied story elements with a thinking map and we used the story T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving.

Solid Figures Activity

This math sort went very well. 

 

Turkeys and Comparing Numbers

We are continuing with addition skills and we did our turkey project to reinforce skills.

We have also been studying whether a number is more or less than another.  I have introduced the greater or less than symbol.  This activity worked really well in reinforcing the correct use of the symbol.  Students made the connection several days later when we did a standard paper and pencil math worksheet.