Late Post: It's Gingerbread Time!

So I started writing this BEFORE holiday break started and never got to finishing. Now that holiday break is almost over (wah!), I supposed I should get this done. Haha.

December was filled with the world of gingerbread. We read different gingerbread stories, worked on different reading strategies while reading them, and then planned and wrote our own gingerbread stories! Somewhat similar to the Cinderella Unit that I did when I taught second grade, but more tailored for first.

Some of the books we read are shown below. 

[Disclaimer: If you click on the picture, it will bring you to Amazon through my Amazon Associate link.]

          

While reading the books, we filled out a story elements chart to compare and contrast each of the stories and look at their settings, main characters, supporting characters, and "rhymes" (as I liked to call it) that the gingerbread characters say. I told the kids that this was part of our research as authors because we would eventually be writing our own version of the story too. In the end, we ended up with a wall of gingerbread anchor charts as we read through the different books!

We also used many resources that I found on TpT to help with our research including the ones below:

  

Click on the images above to see the full product on TpT.

For the planning of our own story writing, the students started off with deciding who their main gingerbread character would be. We listed off some ideas and then everyone got busy creating a picture of their gingerbread character on a gingerbread template.

     

     

After that, we decided on the setting and our supporting characters, and also did some story mapping before finally writing the story.

What I got were some amazing stories! After spending almost three weeks working on these stories, we obviously had to throw a publishing party to celebrate this awesome accomplishment! The kids learned a very cute gingerbread dance very similar to this:

They performed it for their parents while wearing cute gingerbread headbands that they made. 

After the dance performance, the parents joined the kids for the publishing party. The kids read their stories to their parents and then got to decorate a gingerbread cookie together.

Everyone had lots of fun!

And that's the end of my blog post on our first grade gingerbread unit! Hooray! Time to go sleep now! :)