spicy activites in the house!

Last week in the classroom we read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. Along with the usual suspects,we set out additional fine motor, math, and craft activities with a little extra spice added, like our story basket complete with a gingerbread baby, gingerbread house, and animal masks printed from Jan Brett's website. I found the gingerbread baby and house at Michael's on clearance a few years ago. They have similar items this year.

These adorable gingerbread men cookies came from Homeschool Creations. I printed them out, laminated them, then backed them with felt. I placed five ofthem on our cookie sheet, along with a spatula and set them on top of a shelf with no explanation. The children took the cookie sheet to the floor and practiced scooping them up with the spatula. All day long I was offered cookies, and at clean up I found them in the play kitchen. The cookie sheet is from an Ikea set and I only had to re-glue one felt back (so far). 

These kooky silicone dealios came from a Japanese Dollar store. I'm not even sure what they are for as they are not sturdy enough for cookie dough or rice. Either way, I pulled out coordinating pompoms and set this up to see what the kiddos would do. They very carefully filled in each gingerbread baby with matching pompoms AND they cleaned it up when they we finished. This photo is from last year, this year, I put the pompoms in a small lidded basket and the element of reveal was really fun to watch. I loved this activity! 

Oh how I love these! I got this happy set from etsy seller how we learn at home, the bowl came with a separate set from another seller. 

So simple and so cool! The mancala board was a thriftstore find and the bells came from the dollar store four years ago. The ladle came from a set of kitchen utensils I found at Tuesday Morning. Setting out the ladle and spatula (above) allowed for an introduction to new tools and vocabulary.

Another fun one from Homeschool Creations. These we for scissors practuce but I laminated them and added Dry Erase markers for line tracing. Again, I had this set up at a table with no explanation and the kiddos sat down on their own and traced the lines! Then they wiped off their lines, turned the sheets over to the blank side and drew pictures. 

I made these felt pieces two years and they are still going strong. On the tray are assorted shapes cut from felt and pieces of yarn and rik-rak. 

This is a retro candy themed matching game from eeboo. The children sort out matches, line up the squares, carry around the pieces, and pass them out as if they were real candy. I love this! 

Last, we have this wooden bead stringing activity that I found last week at Home Goods! Serendipitous! The children love this and again, the pieces end up being used in so many different ways.

gingerbread men round 2

This year the children whipped up their own puffy paint to paint their gingerbread men and/or houses with. After reading more than a dozen recipes for diy puffy paint I came to the conclusion that the ratios did not need to be exact and that all you needed was salt, flour, baking soda, and a little water (plus liquid water color).

 

We mixed up our paint at circle time. Each kiddo was given a small container and spoon on one of our white plates (I LOVE these plates). Then I talked about the paint we were going to make and how it was a recipe. We've been working on recipes almost every week. The children took turns scooping out their desired amounts of the ingredients and got to mixing.

There were a lot of comments when the children found their paint to be too thick or too thin. After a little experimenting they each came up with their perfect pot of paint.

 

I poured the paint into small squeeze bottle that made it difficult for the children to get all squeeze happy. They really had to work those squeezing muscles!  Even though they each mixed up their own color we talked about sharing the paint with the rest of the class and how we could accomplish that through kind words and questions.

 

While I love the idea of using real candy to decorate their cardboard people and houses (like we did last year) I wanted for them to make something that could possibly be kept without attracting critters. To remedy this I spent one television program using various paper punches and a paper pad of holiday paper from Michael's to punch out circles, stars, and hearts of various sizes.

 

 

The children delighted in their creations and use oodles of thinking skills when they realized their paint would not puff up when we cooked it  (pop into microwave and cook for 20 seconds or so)if it was covered in paper. I loved seeing and listening to their collaborations and discoveries. Some layered circles and told me it was like "Disky" back from when we did our Kandinsky study, while others talked about shapes, size variations, and practiced their one to one correspondence with one paper shape to each blob of paint that they then counted out.

I mean, lookie how happy these creations are (blurry photos and all)! I used a template the mister made for me last year. I need to transfer to the computer so you all can have a copy if ya like.

Also, the clean up was so pretty I had to take a picture of it as well. We kept the paint out and available for the day. Oh my goodness! I just realized the sticky bottles of paint are in a zip bag somewhere in the casa...where did I put them?  I better find them before they get super ickified! Yikes! Enjoy!

setting up the festive classroom

our storybasket for the gingerbread baby

Our literature for the two weeks before the winter break is teaming with all sorts of festive goodness. This past week we read The Gingerbread Baby and next week we will be reading Rabbit's Gift. Here's a peak into our classroom for our week of gingerbread...

sorting gingerbread men

investigating area w gingerbread men and pom poms

gingerbread felt fun

candy memory/matching game

decorating our play gingerbread house

exploring our toaster set to accompany our nursery rhyme

dot marker holiday trees

fine motor dreidel fun

fine motor tree decorating