I am so excited about this new unit! It has been a labor of love I tell you. I thought I would never get it finished! I’m so excited to start using these activities with my first and second graders this week. I’ve mentioned a few times over the years how I’m a nut for the holidays. I. love. it. all. Now that I’m not a classroom teacher, I am really missing all the holiday fun we usually have. Polar express, gingerbread book study, Christmas Around the World… I miss it all! I will be definitely poking my head into the first grade classroom to see what they are up to. 🙂 Since I am in desperate need for my holiday fix, I made these gingerbread literacy activities:
It’s a mixture of hands-on centers and ready-to-go printables. This *might* be one of my favorite units that I’ve made. It literally put me in a good mood while I was making it.
In this huge pack, you’ll find…
- My own adaptation of The Gingerbread Man. This has been kid-tested and it passed the test. I printed it out for my son and he asks me to read it over and over. We love our gingerbread books, so it was fun to add one to our collection. 🙂
This story has some great comprehension questions. This is perfect for a close reading lesson!
- 3 Reading passages, each with about 3 reading levels (so it could work for 1st and 2nd with varying ability levels). There are also comprehension question and some close reading prompts.
- 2 read, think Match pages
- 2 Read, Visualize, Draw (one with two levels)
- 2 Read and Sequence (one is from my December literacy packet. I had to include it since it’s gingerbread related. But there is a second one that is new)
- I wrote a gingerbread man poem. This will be a lot of fun to do with my firsties! There is a student sheet and pocket chart strips so you could do some rebuilding. I also made a much simpler one that I will use with my kinders and one of my first grader groups.
- 8 word work centers:
- Rhyme match
- Cookie Jar sort: sounds of y
- Syllable match: matching up two syllable words
- Frost the cookies: TWO versions: matching consonant blends with word endings OR matching word to a suffix
- Ginger Sound Count: counting phonemes
- Baking Words: This looks similar to something in my kinder menu. I loved it so much and wanted to have something like this for my firsties and 2nd graders. So I made the word options harder so it works for them. They can build words with oo, ai, or short i.
- Gumdrop sort: sorting long and short vowels (again, it looks like a kinder center, but it’s different. I just loved the clip art so I tweaked it for older kids.)
- Blend the Batter: matching onset and rime
- 4 Sentence Scramblers
- Super Sentence Gingerbread story: two options (the harder one includes adjectives and adverbs. The easier one only has adjectives, when and where)
- Sentence Enders
- Fill a Sentence: prepositional words
- Gingerbread opinion writing: 3 prompts
- Reader Response: retell with planning page
- Sticker story
- Describe a Cookie
Over the years, I posted a few gingerbread related freebies too. You won’t want to miss these! In case you missed them last year or if you’re a new follower, I’ll include them here again.
Here is a post from last year with two freebies and some other ideas to do with your class. Click on the pictures to go to that post to see more detail and download these freebies!
A little book so your class can write their own version:
and writing prompts with rubrics:
I hope you all have a great week!
