Blog Brag

Welcome to Gingerville!

My sweet teacher friend Mrs. Kelly has just finished up an awesome Gingerbread Unit with her darling firsties! I just HAVE to brag on her brilliance a little bit. She started out by reading as many of the Gingerbread Man versions she could find to her students. While reading students were making text to text connections and predicting if the stories would end the same.

Since Mrs. Kelly's class theme is pirates students got to pick a Gingerbread story to retell on a pirate ship they designed! Students recorded The beginning, middle, and ending of a Gingerbread story of their choice. Then she put them outside her classroom in the ocean!

She made gingerbread play dough so that her students could smell the gingerbread and make their own creations from the dough. Her students tasted ginger snaps and charted descriptive words from their five senses. Then they thought about how they eat a gingerbread cookie...what part do you bite off first? They charted their class data and it turns out the majority of her students bit off the

Mrs. Kelly asked her students to think about why in all the gingerbread man stories the gingerbread avoids water. Then her class did a science experiment: "What will happen when we put the gingerbread cookie in a tub of water?" Her class documented their predictions in their science data notebooks. Then the class observed the gingerbread cookie in the water and figured out that gingerbread cookies dissolve in water!

Mrs. Kelly and her class then brainstormed what would be in a Gingerbread community! They were inspired by this poem:

If I Could Build a Town

If I could build a town , well then

I know just what I'd make:

An icecream store, a toy store

And a store with bread and cake.

I guess I'd make a park,

And build a nifty fire station.

Say, would you like to help me?

It just take imagination!

 

Then they got to build their own Gingerbread community! They used small milk cartons as the base and covered them with colored paper. They included buildings like a hospital, vet office, mall, movie theatre, JEA, porta potties, and so much more! They decided to name their community "Gingerville" and even named the streets. They each built their own house out of graham crackers and added a neighborhood! Mrs. Kelly and her class had a blast!

 

 



Mrs. Kelly and her first grade class!

 The kids raided the treasure box to find occupants for their homes!