Gingerbread Week

It is Gingerbread Week! We have a lot of fun this week, especially because it is the last week before Winter Break. But, I still want my students to work on language arts and listening skills. We do hunt the Gingerbread Man all over school. He's a sneaky little guy. We also make our Gingerbread Man: Escape Prevention Plan (a unit my class LOVES every year and available on TpT). This year we will be working on a story study. We will be comparing the different versions of the Gingerbread Man (and there are A LOT!) Below is a copy of the book we make about our stories. This book is for beginners. There are no writing lines. I chose to leave out the lines because I do not want my students to get stuck on the idea of writing a formal sentence. I want them to be brave enough to try and write about the story. Even if all I get are color words, I will praise their efforts and make suggestions so that next time that student will feel brave enough to try and write a little more. Take a look at this free story study and I hope you can do this with your own class.

Gingerbread Man Story Study

As a family project this week I am asking my students to decorate and write about their gingerbread man. I have formal lines on this sheet because I want parents to help them complete a sentence. They can make their gingerbread man into anything they want. Then they have to finish the sentence "My gingerbread man is ___________." This gets the parents thinking about their child's writing as well and helping the kids with their writing by providing a starter to the sentence.

My gingerbread man is ______________.

I hope you and your class have a MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

And a very merry WINTER BREAK!

Go Away Big Green Monster!

It was green week in our class this week. We painted and constructed a paper plate frog with a party blower as his tongue. We made an alligator picture and read the story Baby Alligator by Robert Munsch. And we read Go Away Big Green Monster. The kids LOVE Big Green Monster.

I read this story and then re-read it using felt pieces on my felt board. The kids love using the felt board for story retell. Then me made a big green monster to hang up in our classroom.

I found a website that has amazing story retell props. It is call KizClub. They have many stories and I am looking forward to using a lot of them. The kids had fun putting their monsters together and I had fun watching them retell the story with their friends as they put their monster together.