As hinted at yesterday, we’ve started a Christmas Around the World Unit, and we’re having lots of fun with it so far, it’s made a great homeschool Christmas unit and a low-key homeschool geography lesson. We’ve finished up Christmas in Germany, and are mostly done with Iceland, so you’ll see posts about that next week.
Christmas in Germany: gingerbread cookies
We started off reading The Gingerbread Man and making gingerbread cookies. Actually, the first recipe I made wasn’t for cookies you can roll out, so we had to make two batches.
The kids “suffered” through more cookies (the final working recipe is the one I included in the printable from Jan Brett’s website, which again if you haven’t been there go spend a few days drooling over all the free printables she’s created.) And she’s got some awesome printables to go with her Gingerbread Baby books. That, and Jolanthe just put up earlier this week a whole slew of cool gingerbread activities, and apparently, that’s her post today.
After making some cookies we put together our puppets and acted out the story.
Next, we went over to Jan Brett’s website again (can you tell how much I love it?) and went to her mural page and printed off the houses for my kids to create houses (and no that’s not a picture of my kids coloring houses, but I wanted a picture). I told them the story of Hansel and Gretel to go with this. Ahhhh, yes the nice gruesome Christmas tale of Hansel and Gretel. Oh, it’s not really Christmas is it?
Of course, after we did that I saw this cool post of a paper bag foldable gingerbread house that is way too cute. Why does that always happen?
And we couldn’t learn about Germany without learning about Saint Nicholas and Saint Nicholas Day, my kids thought getting presents put in shoes was hilarious. I thought the fact that some kids try to use the biggest shoe they can find hilarious. And to go with it what a better way to learn than to watch the VeggieTales version of ST. NICHOLAS
Christmas Around the World: Germany lapbook
For the tracing, I created the words in word art so the kids could trace them.
To write through what’s on here. On the front and back covers: German word to trace, the Jan Brett gingerbread houses (the big huge one is Batman’s who decided Santa was visiting).
On the inside are the recipe, their puppets, a book on Saint Nicholas, and lift the flap book for St. Thomas Day (that’s the donkey). And all three kids had to draw what they wanted from Saint Nicholas. Which, as I recall was Iron Man toys, Blue Arrow costume, and something that I can’t remember or decipher from her picture. Oh, and I was quite proud of Batman for writing Saint Nicholas all on his own, of course, I then had to find a creative way to glue it into the book…..
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Now, head on over to Jolanthe’s website at Homeschool Creations and see the AWESOME gingerbread unit she’s put up and what everyone else is up to this week.
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