Making Gingerbread Men

Cross-curricular Literacy and Numeracy skills in a real-life setting. 😜

Continuing with our fairytales theme, it made sense to make some gingerbread men! After re-reading the story, we looked at the recipe together (revising our work on instructions).

INGREDIENTS
For the biscuit:
100g butter (softened)
175g brown sugar
1 medium egg (beaten)
4 tbsp golden syrup
3-5 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
350g plain flour

To decorate:
75g milk chocolate
Smarties, sultanas, sprinkles, etc.

METHOD
1) Cream together the butter and sugar using an electric hand whisk.
2) Beat in the egg, followed by the golden syrup, using the whisk.
3) Mix together the ginger, bicarbonate of soda and flour in a separate bowl.
4) Stir the dry mixture into the wet mixture using a wooden spoon, a little at a time, until it begins to form a dough. Once all the flour has been added, work it together with your hands to make a ball.
5) Leave to chill in the fridge for 20min.
6) Pre-heat the oven to 180°C and line 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
7) Roll the gingerbread to 1cm thick, cut out shapes and place on the trays.
8) Bake for around 10min until golden brown. Leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
9) Decorate using melted chocolate as a "glue".

You can download our recipe sheet here. The ginger in this recipe is quite mild (for Papa's sake!) so you may want to increase accordingly.

Usually, I pre-measure the ingredients so the girls can just concentrate on the baking, but this time they weighed and measured everything themselves - which ties in with their next Numeracy topic on length, weight and capacity. (The cm reference in the recipe was new to them! But a good conversation starter 👌)

How I set up the table ready for them to decorate the gingerbread men:

I demonstrated how to do one: take a gingerbread man from the bowl, dip its feet in the chocolate then in the sprinkles, lay it flat on your plate, take one of the Smarties and dip it in chocolate then stick on the gingerbread man's tummy, repeat for another one of the Smarties, put the finished gingerbread man on the big plate. Then I left them to it - only helping to refill the bowl and change the big plate to an empty one - and mashaAllah they did all 26 without any problems, the 2 year old included! In the past, we've used sultanas for eyes and drawn mouths with icing... But with the baby, this was simplest for today. 😋

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While we were waiting for the gingerbread to cool down before decorating, I decided to use the Smarties as a way of practising the work we'd done so far on tallying and bar charts - simply by having the girls tally the different colours in the packet and draw a graph of the results.

I had them predict which colour they thought would be the most common before they started - which added to the fun as they tallied - and the colouring in at the end was optional, but they both decided they wanted to do it. 😊

You can download our worksheet here. Feel free to edit as you wish - I'll probably use this template myself in different contexts and will change the questions at the bottom to practise different ways of analysing data. 👍

Fairytale Picture Summary

The question I wrote on their Target Poster for Literacy this week was "Can you tell a story without words?" The twins' initial reaction was, "NO!" lol 😂

First, we looked at a picture from one of their comprehension books and talked about what they thought was happening... Who is in the picture? What are they doing? Where are they? Why? How are they feeling? What time of day is it? What might happen next? etc. etc. After we'd talked in depth about the picture, I summarised their thoughts into a story structure... "It was the afternoon and everyone had gathered in the field for a big race. Poggo and Zap were going to race around the track and everyone was there to cheer them on. Poggo's hat blew off because he was going so fast! But Zap was the winner, crossing the finish line just before Poggo. Zap was really happy he won! Poggo was upset he lost but happy for his friend." Then we talked about how we understood a whole story just from looking carefully at one picture - the picture was able to tell a story without words!

Next, we read the story of Little Red Riding Hood in storyboard format. When we were done, we talked about how this version of the fairytale was different to other versions they'd read or heard... Then we "read" through the story again, but this time just using the pictures as prompts.

Finally, we talked about how pictures can summarise a lot of words; remember how in the first picture we looked at, we were able to get a whole story out of just one picture? And when we looked at the storyboard, how many words were written underneath each picture? Then we chose a fairytale to summarise ourselves - reminding the girls of a story structure (split into three parts: beginning, middle and ending) and which were the main parts...

The girls both wanted to do The Gingerbread Man. They summarised it as:
1) Someone baked The Gingerbread Man.
2) The Gingerbread Man ran away from everyone: people and animals.
3) The Gingerbread Man was eaten by a fox.

Then they drew corresponding pictures into a pre-made template:

After they were done, I asked them to tell the story using the pictures they'd drawn. One of them ended up changing the story's ending so The Gingerbread Man wasn't eaten by the fox! I said that was fine, since fairytales can be told any way we want to... That's part of what makes them a fairytale. 😁😁

You can download our simple template here.

Fairytales

We're going to use fairytales as the scaffold for our next few Literacy targets, as is common for children of this age!

To build up to this topic, we've been reading in books and watching on YouTube a variety of different fairytales and also different versions of the same story. So for our first task, I gave them some pictures with characters from the fairytales the girls are familiar with...

I asked them which stories they were from... What were the stories' titles? I asked them who the main characters were and if they had anything in common. They noticed the characters were often animals and that the animals could do things animals can't really do, such as speak! There were also made up creatures such as witches, giants and trolls.

What was the setting for each story? Where did it take place? They said it was usually a forest, not in a big city. When was the setting - nowadays, in modern times, or in the past? They realised they all took place in the past, before things we have nowadays such as TVs and computers. Why might that be? Because the stories were all written in the past!

So because a common setting was a forest, on a piece of A3 sugar paper the girls had a go at painting a forest background - we played this video on YouTube as inspiration and for background sound. The 2 year old joined in too! I only gave them red, blue, yellow, green and white paint - so they needed to mix any other colours/shades they wanted.

While waiting for their paintings to dry, they coloured in and cut out the fairytale characters from before. Then they stuck these down on top using PVA glue. Finally, the twins wrote the word "fairytales" somewhere in their forest using glitter gel pens.

You can download the pictures we used (from http://images.google.com) here.