Making Gingerbread Babies!

We wanted to let you know that tomorrow your children will be bringing a friend home with them...made of gingerbread! We will be baking gingerbread men tomorrow. The children are VERY excited to bake and eat the cookies, and little do they know that baking and cooking is a fantastic way to teach skills in science, math, and literacy, and have fun at the same time.

Since the beginning of December, one of the songs we have been reading and singing together has been Gingerbread Boy, which you can find in the Songs and Poems section of the blog, or ask your child to sing to you! When we bake the cookies tomorrow, the children will see the song come to life.

Today we read The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett, which we will re-read throughout the week so the children become familiar enough with the story that they can re-tell it, "read" the pictures, and make predictions. 

After reading the story, we discussed what we need to be able to bake our cookies - what is a recipe? What are ingredients? How do we know what steps to take, and in what order? Using a recipe together is a great way for children to see that writing has a real purpose, and it is a good introduction to procedural writing, which is writing used to give step-by-step instructions, which they will work on in Grade 1. Ms Hammond wrote out our gingerbread ingredients and we read them together, discussing the measurement terms like "cups" and "teaspoons":

Then we led the children through a shared writing exercise as we wrote out the recipe steps together, with special focus on procedural and sequential language like "first, second, third," and "then, next, last." 

Do you cook or bake with your children at home? Do they like to help? Do you use recipes in your home language? Hopefully tomorrow you get to taste the results of the children's hard work...before the gingerbread babies run away!

Ms Snyder and Ms Hammond