Posted by Nicole Carney on Dec 8, 2013 in Christmas Activities, Gingerbread Man Activities, Literacy Activities, Picture Book Activities, Winter Activities, Winter Picture Book Activities | 0 comments

One of M’s favourite stories is The Gingerbread Man, so it’s no surprise that he really enjoyed the book The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School, by Laura Murray as well.

The title pretty much explains it all; it’s about a Gingerbread Man who searches the school for his class, fearing they had left him behind and forgot about him. The children had left him to cool, while they went outside for recess. The Gingerbread Man encounters many predicaments along the way but, thanks to some helpful teachers, he is eventually reunited with his class, who are VERY happy to see him return!

After reading the story to my boys, we decorated some gingerbread men with icing and candies.

The Gingerbread Man Loose in Our House!

The next morning, we read the story again, and returned to our plate of gingerbread men, when we noticed something peculiar; one of our gingerbread men had disappeared and left a note in his place.

I read the first note to the boys, pointing to each word as I read them in order to teach word-to-word correspondence. The boys were really excited to do a scavenger hunt for their lost gingerbread man.

Each note started the same (“Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!”) and ended with a new place he had ran to (“I ran to the _____).

For each note M and B found, I made M read the beginning part (the part written in red) and point to each word as he read them. I also had him identify and circle certain words in the passage, using a washable marker, before they could move on to a new destination.

The last note left us right back where we started from, but our Gingerbread Man had returned, with a message that read, “Uh, Oh! You caught me!”

As a reward, the boys chowed down on a couple of the gingerbread men.

Here is a copy of the notes the Gingerbread Man left us, in case you’re interested in adapting it: Gingerbread Man Hunt

Sequence of Events

After the boys had finished eating their cookies, I had M recall the places the Gingerbread Man had us go to, and put the events in sequential order, using the Gingerbread Man sequence of events strips. The beginning of the sentences were the same (“I ran to the _____”.) and only the ending was different. I had M read the first part of each sentence and we sounded out the last part together. I would let M guess what he thought the words said based on the initial letters (you could also add pictures to make it into a more independent activity).

Sentence Reconstruction

For this activity, I used the first part of the gingerbread man message and had M reconstruct the sentence, “Run, run, as fast as you can!” by matching the cutout words with the words on the paper. You can print off your own copies here: Gingerbread Man sentence reconstruction sentence reconstruction 1