During the month of December we'll be reading different gingerbread stories. We'll start off the month with "The Gingerbread Cowboy" by Janet Squires. This is a fun version of the traditional tale except it is set in the wild west and the cookie wears a cowboy hat and boots! Yeehaw! Ask your child to re-tell this story using the gingerbread cowboy puppet that we made in class.
We will also read "The Gingerbread Girl" and "The Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers" by Lisa Campbell Ernst as well as "The Gingerbread Bear" by Robert Dennis and "The Gingerbread Bunny" by Jonathan Allen. In pre-school we also sang and acted out the song "Five Little Gingerbread Men Lying on a Tray" and made our own trays and cookies.
We also did a science experiment to determine why the Gingerbread Man didn't just swim across the river to escape the folks chasing him. Why did he trust that sly fox? Well do you know what happens to a cookie when it gets wet? We do! First we took a glass and filled it with water. Then we dropped a crunchy gingerbread cookie into the water, made predictions about what would happen to him and finally put him aside while we listened to another gingerbread story. After the story we checked on our gingerbread man and ewwww! He got all mushy and soggy and broke apart! No wonder he didn't want to get wet!
So make sure to ask your child what's been going on with that delicious gingerbread cookie this week!
Here are some photos of the projects that we made to help us re-tell these stories to our families.