Can't catch me... I'm the Gingerbread Man!

Every December, I do a unit on the Gingerbread Man with my kinders. It's one of my favorite units of the year-- and every year it grows! Here is a recap of a few of my favorite things from this year:

First, we read about 10 different versions of the story -- from the original "Gingerbread Man" to "The Gingerbread Girl" to "The Gingerbread Pirates." The kids loved every one of them -- and the different versions provided the perfect opportunity to compare and contrast. For each version, we identified the main character, setting, chant, other characters, and the ending. 

Later that week, we decorated cookies and graphed our "first bites."

I'm not going to lie to you... the cookies looked pretty gross! Ha ha! But the kids loved every minute of it.

After taking our first bites and adding them to the graph, many students were given the opportunity to "defend" their choice. For example, one little guy said: "I bit off his head so he couldn't see where he was going! That way, he couldn't run away from me!" 

Math + cookies = fun, fun, fun!

One of my favorite parts of the unit was our "science experiment." In all of the versions of the story, the Gingerbread Man never wanted to get wet in the river! Why?... we wondered.

So, of course, we had to find out. First, each kinder was given a cookie. We drew what he looked like before his "swim."

We added our cookies to a cup of water (one cup per group), and waiting for a minute or two. As you ca see in the background, we also had a quick snack while we waited. :)

When we tried to take them out... they crumbled into pieces!

And, we drew the results. Great fun -- and the kids were very surprised by the results.

Click HERE or on the picture above for a printable of our Gingerbread experiment worksheet.