In The Gingerbread Man Loose in School by Laura Murray, the familiar character from the tale of the Gingerbread Man has now been retold in a new way. In this book, the Gingerbread Man has been created by a classroom. After he has come out of the oven, he is looking for his class! As he explores the school, he has a number of adventures before he finds his class, who has also been looking for him. When we read the book this week, we decided to continue the fun by playing Gingerbread Man hide-and-seek in our “school,” aka our basement.
I’ve always enjoyed the tale of the Gingerbread Man so we could have an excuse to talk about cookies and maybe bake some cookies! I like reading the original tale and any variation on it. But I particularly like when the Gingerbread Man is a friendly chap, because then it is not as likely that he will be eaten up!
For Strawberry, she loved considering the Gingerbread Man to be a friend. In Ms Murray’s books (there are a number of them in the series), it is lots of fun to see the adventures the cookie goes on.(We must suspend disbelief that a cookie would not, of course, be eaten, but all that he would not fall apart if he tried to move.)
Gingerbread Man Hide-and-Seek came to mind as we read the book because both the class and the Gingerbread Man were looking for each other! We took turns hiding our roughly sketched copy of the Gingerbread Man.
The rule we made was some part of him had to be visible without having to move something. He hid under tables, between books, and on school bags!
To add to the learning, I built upon a page in the picture book. In this page, the illustrator shows a simple floor plan of the school in order to help the Gingerbread Man get directions. We made our own simple floor plan of our basement rooms too! This way, if the “seeker” was stumped, we could give hints by pointing to the map.
This gave my preschooler and I a little bit more of an understanding of maps. As I mentioned recently, we’re doing the #GiveYourChildTheWorld challenge, and we began by learning about our place on the map and globe. While she’s seen town maps (GPS in the car) and the world map and globe, she has not had as much exposure to a simple floor plan.
This was a nice twist. We added some furniture to our map (after I took the picture) so that we could better visualize where in the room we were. Strawberry liked showing where the Gingerbread Man was hiding!
Of course, reading about a Gingerbread Man always makes one want to each Gingerbread! Extension activities could include baking cookies together! I also think this would be a fun way to practice right from left, as directions are given to the Gingerbread Man’s hiding place.
This post is a part of the Homeschool Blogging Network’s series, 10 Days of Tips for Homeschooling Moms.
This week, I’m going to share 10 days of Picture Book Preschool Lessons.
Click over to the landing page to see the other posts I will be sharing. You can also see what tips the other homeschooling bloggers are sharing on their blogs.
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