Gingerbread Kick-Off!

Today was our first day of my week-long gingerbread unit!  Gingerbread is definitely one of the most fun themes that we cover during the year. I thought I'd post some pictures of how we kicked it off today.  At the end of the post, I will post my gingerthemed plans for the rest of the week (sorry it's going to be in a fancy schmancy visual schedule format at this point in the day, lol). I also have a freebie to share.

Here's what we managed to get done today:

Several of my reading groups read this decodable reader (available in my gingerbread unit).

We practiced blending CCVC and CVC words on a gingerbread  Elkonin box mat--we used dry erase markers for this.

Another reading group read a gingerbread man color word booklet-I think this was from an old Mailbox book.

We made a class  book...the templates are available here for free.  It's also included in my gingerbread unit.

Illustrating our class book!

We played Fox's Word Munch sight word game available in my gingerbread unit.

Children read sight words and fed them to the hungry fox if they read the words correctly.  If not, they placed them on their "cookie sheet" and wrote them for extra practice.

You can kind of see the fox word bag in this picture.

We retold the Gingerbread Man story with props that we cut and colored.

The children store their props in this cute gingerbread house pocket.  We are saving them to retell again tomorrow.  You guessed it...these are also available in my gingerbread unit on TpT!

More retelling! 

Here is what we will be up to for the rest of the week with our Gingerbread Theme...I will most more pictures as the week goes on.

Tuesday: Read Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. Make Gingerbread Friends art project.

Wednesday: Gingerbread Man science experiment-What would have happened if the gingerbread man swam across the river?  *Found a great freebie recording sheet for this at Babbling Abby's blog.

Thursday: Gingerbread Cookie Graph: What body part did you eat first?

I am using this freebie from Lori at Teaching With Love and Laughter for our graphing activity.

*Here is another super cute graph freebie from Fabulous in First plus other activities.
Friday-Make gingerbread houses!

Lastly...here is my freebie.  It's just a quick beginning, middle, end page that's adaptable to any gingerbread story you use!  I was tired of finding sequencing pages with the wrong characters for the ginger stories I have:).  Click here to go get it.

Thanks for reading...leave a comment if you use any of the links or grab my freebie:).  Hope your Monday was bearable!