Smart Cookies

The Connected Combo is full of smart cookies.  In addition to comparing and contrasting different gingerbread stories, we did all sorts of learning with the gingerbread theme.   We have six new word wizard words that seem to keep popping up in the stories.  Have you heard your child using these words: fancy, shaped, rather, delicious, boast, and devour.

 

One of our learning centers was to sort the cookies by beginning sound.  Then, in spelling, we made words from the letters g-i-n-g-e-r-b-r-e-a-d.   For writing, the first graders used adjectives and transition words (first, next, then, last) to write a piece on how to eat a gingerbread cookie.  While the second graders also wrote a how to piece, their writing was about how to catch a gingerbread cookie.

For art, we made gingerbread ornaments and giant gingerbread faces.  In math, the first graders worked on fact families and missing addend problems.  For example, I have 15 gingerbread cookies.  8 are in the cookie jar.  How many are still in the oven?  We used a balance tool to check our work.  The second graders started building a foundation for multiplication by making cookie sheet arrays.

Gingerbread even made its way into science.  In one of the gingerbread stories, the fox tricks the gingerbread man by convincing him to ride on his back across the river.  In this science experiment, our key question was: What would happen to the gingerbread man if he "swam" across the river himself?  We made predictions then tested our hypothesis.  The students observed and recorded what was happening to the gingerbread man in water at 20 minutes and one hour.  They concluded that water makes the gingerbread soggy and it will break apart.  Great work, scientists!

 

Finally, we worked computer science into the gingerbread theme thanks to a teacher blogger from Oklahoma that I adore (Brooke Brown @ Teach Outside the Box).   In this "unplugged" coding activity, player one created a path to the gingerbread house.  The path included two treats to eat and one enemy to avoid.  Then, player two had to use symbols to code the path to the house.  The students did amazing playing the game.