A Peek Inside Our Gingerbreadland!

It's been a busy couple of weeks in my classroom!  We've taken the Polar Express to

 Gingerbreadland and if my kids have their way we're not coming back!   We've been reading, 

comparing, and analyzing  many different versions of The Gingerbread Man.  We started out

 with a traditional version by Jim Aylesworth. My kids got such a kick out of trying to decide 

when this story takes place. One of my kiddos is convinced it happened "a thousand years ago"!  

His evidence? "Well, just look at that stove!" and  "Their family picture is black and white!"  

We started by answering the question, "What is a gingerbread man?".  

We used this circle map to help us define a gingerbread man.

We've been comparing story elements and determining equivalent characters for some of our

 stories then recording our ideas on class charts and in student booklets. 

We discussed the story problems from the different character's points of view.  

We made a nifty anchor chart which I forgot to take a picture of! 

Can I just say that I A*D*O*R*E this book?  It's my new favorite version!  The Musubi Man 

captured my heart a few years ago, but he has since been replaced!  

My kids love it which makes me love it even more!  They all made so many connections 

to this book, the most popular being getting hurt at school, having to be brave, 

and looking for the nurse's office. What child hasn't had to visit the nurse?  

They were quite impressed that he knew how to ask for directions!

I love it because it lends itself to so many second grade Common Core reading standards.  Who knew?

We talked a lot about cause and effect and how the characters responded to major events

 in the story. The next day we discussed character traits and how good readers can infer 

and draw conclusions about the type of person a character is by the things the author shows

 us that they say, do, or think. We've spent a lot of time with adjectives so far this year and our first graders work a lot with "five senses" adjectives (words that describe how something looks, feels, sounds, etc.) 

so we spent some time on adjectives that describe a person's character.

We made these cute little characters and students brainstormed character traits. 

 They wrote about specific story events and the character traits they could infer from them.  

This led to a good discussion to answer the question "Why does the author include the things 

he/she does in a story?" 

 During our literacy stations the kids made these missing posters.  They had to include 

a description of the character and one of my favorites is "He's wearing black Sponge Bob pants!". 

We have so many activities planned during this unit I had to come up with a way

 to keep my kiddos organized!

We made gingerbread flow maps to sequence the story events.  Students chose their favorite

 version and wrote the main idea (this is still such a hard one for my kids) on the body. 

 This was easy to differentiate, and I had some of my students write the main ideas with

supporting details on the legs.

Students wrote their own versions with the prompt "What if the fox was a cookie?"  

They used this prewriting page to note their ideas for the beginning, middle, and end.

They also wrote adjectives to describe the fox during each stage of the story.   We attached them to litttle cookie sheets to display.  I love this one!  

We've talked about a recurring theme in many of the gingerbread man versions being 

 the little old woman and the little old man desperately wanting a child.  

Here, they wanted a pet!

To get a jump start on data and graphing for next quarter and to tie in some math to our unit

we decorated for data with gingerbread cookies!  I had my wonderful parents send in

gingerbread cookies that we found at Michael's craft stores. Wilton makes these and so far

I've been able to find them for the past three years. You could also do this on construction paper.

The glyph key is color specific rather than candy specific so you could cut shapes to replace the candy.

We started out by decorating our cookies as glyphs, rearranging the cookies so that students

didn't know which belonged to whom. They then drew the data they saw, interpreted it and tried to determine who the cookie belonged to. Next, we all took one bite of our cookies and 

created a pictograph.  After lunch, we recorded the data on student sheets translating it into a 

bar graph and tally table.

I placed the students in groups for a little graph chat. They used task cards to guide
 their discussions and then added a written response.

All of these activities and so much more can be found in my Catch Me If You Can! unit.  It is loaded with 124 pages of reading stragies, writing activities, crafts, graphic organizers,
literacy centers, and math integration!

You can find it in my TeachersPayTeachers Store or Teacher's Notebook Shop

Next week we'll be reading a whole new batch of books so stay tuned for Part 2!

  

You'll  definitely want to stop by Monday-Friday next week
for 5 Days of Freebies! 

I'll be posting a new gingerbread freebie

 for you each day!

PS~ Are these not the cutest little Ginger-bets ever?  They were made by my friend
Michelle at The 3am Teacher and I just can't get enough of them!  There are two different sets
 and both are so stinkin' cute!  You can find them {Here} and {Here}

One last thing...there's a great Christmas crafts linky going on over at 2nd Grade Pad! 

Stop by to check it out!

Have a great weekend, friends!  Only 10 more days until break for me!