Gingerbread Craft

I love having free art explorations out for my students during free-choice time and this gingerbread craft is perfect! My students are welcome to come to explore and create or not. Most of my students love creating with art materials, and giving them options at free choice to tap into this love is a great way to work on fine motor skills, creativity and foster new friendships too. That last thing, the friendship fostering, is something I’ve noticed in my PreK class while they create with these art tray collages. They talk, share tools, pass each other collage materials, and usually end up fostering new friendships. This gingerbread craft is delightful, and there is NO way to do this wrong. Just make your gingerbread man however you want!

Gingerbread Man Craft

Gather your materials. For this gingerbread craft, you will need some pre-cut gingerbread men, mine are felt, but you can do paper too. I love making gingerbread men from recycled paper bags. You will also need some glue and lots of things to collage with. I have ribbon, pom poms, sequins, googly eyes, and some pre-cut sparkly holly ( I can’t tell you where I got this, it’s been in my craft box for 100 years). That’s just it though, use up whatever you have for this fun, creative gingerbread art activity.

Invite the children over and start creating!

Start with glue.

I did make bows out of some of my ribbons too. Hair bows are big in my class, so I thought this might be a good option.

There is no wrong way to make this gingerbread man craft!

Aren’t they fabulous? The trick is to have lots of little tiny things for your students to glue on so they are really giving their fine motor skills a workout!

 

Let dry.

 

Books About Gingerbread

I love reading books about gingerbread men and women before or after creating this gingerbread craft, it helps to create a more meaningful experience.

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Georgie the Gingerbread Fairy by Tim Bugbird is a sparkly, fun book about entrepreneurship. Georgie is a little fairy who makes gingerbread, but her business drops when a new shop opens. When a problem arises with the new shop, it’s Georgie to the rescue to keep the holidays smelling ( yes, you read that right) as the holidays in her little fairy town. My daughter likes this book and loves to pick out which fairy she would be on every page (I’ll give you a hint it’s always the one with the most color pink), and I appreciate the message of problem-solving and women-owned businesses!

The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup was an instant hit with my kindergarten-aged son, but it was too long for my daughter (who was a toddler at the time of review) to sit and listen but wasn’t engrossed in it. The story was all about pirate gingerbread men who came to life on Christmas Eve and faced Santa even though most of them were left for him to eat. There is an adventure; there is humor and a whole lot of Christmas magic. What made this book for me were the illustrations by Matt Tavares. I loved that they were from the perspective of the gingerbread pirates. Love this book.

 

The Gingerbread Man (Easy-to-Read Folktales) by Karen Schmidt is just such a silly story. I do like this tale because while it still packs the punch of one character eating another like many fairy tales, it’s just a gingerbread man, so when the fox eats him, it doesn’t seem so bad.  My son loved the repetition of the text when he was a preschooler and sang along with me as we read. It’s a good story to talk about taunting and showing off. We also played gingerbread man tag later that day, but we skipped the whole cannibalism bit.

Need more Gingerbread Activities for Preschool?

If you want more gingerbread activities to do after this gingerbread craft you have to grab this! There is so much in this mini-unit including crafts, free choice activities, and circle time lesson plans, Check out my Gingerbread Friends Mini-Unit in my teacher shop.