The gingerbread men cause all kinds of trouble and mess the classroom up each night. After they have messed up the classroom a few times, I read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. In this book, the little boy captures the gingerbread baby in a gingerbread house that he has made. I give the students an optional homework assignment. They are to make a trap with their parents. I hope that they go home and discuss what will make a good trap. I find that almost all of my students participate and bring back an array of traps. I usually get all different boxes with trap doors and boxes with sticks to knock down. My favourite trap of all time was from a little boy who brought a bag of gingerbread ladies to catch his gingerbread man. I especially like the traps that I can tell the children have directed and they aren't perfect but to them they are. All of the traps are successful and capture the gingerbread men.

Here the students are presenting their traps to the class. They are explaining how the traps will work and what they are made of. The students are developing their ability to talk in front of a group.

Tanya and Christopher are setting up their traps to catch the gingerbread men.

Another science project is based on the end of most gingerbread man stories. The gingerbread man usually meets his match because he can't cross the river and trusts the fox to take him across. I ask the students why can't he just swim? Then we do a science experiment that asks why is the gingerbread man afraid to get wet. We take a bucket of water and put a gingerbread man in the water and watch what happens. This science experiment is an amazing language builder. We talk about sinking, floating, and dissolving. In the experiment, the gingerbread man starts off floating, usually sinks to the bottom, the molasses comes out, and the gingerbread man floats again. If we leave it long enough they start to break apart and turn mushy.

Student observation sheets

This is the students' first experience of making an observation and writing what they see or explaining it to the class. Here are some samples of what the children observed:

Abigail: "The gingerbread sank because he got heavy. The water went in him to make him heavier."

Dylan: "Gingerbread man broke because he was in the water. He broke because the water came in and the molasses came out."

Benjamin: "He was floating back up. The water pressure made him heavy. The water got full of molasses and he got light and floated back to the top."

Nicole: "It sank because it had molasses in it. Then it floated because the molasses came out of it."

When we make the gingerbread dough it is both math and science combined. The other math activity we do is to make patterns using gingerbread. Patterns are an important mathmatical skill.