The Ultimate Guide on Reading Activities for Preschoolers! Featuring Gingerbread!

Greetings Friends!

This week of the Virtual Book Club for Kids was all about gingerbread featuring the beloved tale of The Gingerbread Man. There are many versions of this classic story available to choose from, so feel free to pick the one that your children would love the most. This was a fun week filled with so many great activities!

Check out our ultimate activity guide for preschoolers featuring dinosaurs!

The Gingerbread Man is a traditional story with amusing, rhyming text that repeats throughout, lending itself nicely to children easily learning the refrain and saying it along with you! This also helps develop early reading skills as they make connections to what they are hearing with the words on the page. This colorful version is very whimsically illustrated and really makes the story come alive. I appreciated that within the story a recipe was included so that you could make your own gingerbread cookies; however, there were no baking instructions, which would definitely be helpful should you want to use this feature. This copy was a faithful retelling of the original story that will appeal to young readers.

This week, I introduced a word wall after reading the story to the boys. Maddox has been showing signs of early reading for a while now and I thought putting key words from the story on his wall, so he could see them during the week would be a great reinforcement tool. I was surprised at how well he responded to it! He enjoyed putting them in the pockets and talking about the words each day.

Here is a link to printable cards available from Sparklebox.

Then we did a math activity using fruit loops from PreKinders! I gave Maddox a bowl of Fruit Loops, which he used to decorate the house printable. After he had it the way he wanted, he placed each cereal on the graph to sort which color he ended up using the most.

It ended up being a three way tie between green, red, and orange. This was a fantastic activity and he really enjoyed it!

Jackson just enjoyed getting a snack!

And no gingerbread week would be complete without actually making gingerbread cookies! Maddox loves helping in the kitchen, so he mixed all the ingredients together and used the cookie cutter to shape the dough. He couldn’t wait to decorate them, but the best part by far obviously was eating them!

All of us around here are huge cookie monsters, so these didn’t last very long. However, if you don’t have that problem or when I make a double batch, it would definitely be fun to try this scavenger hunt from Sunny Day Family using some of the cookies!

As a way to continue reinforcing beginning sounds, I found this printable on Teachers Pay Teachers that I modified somewhat since they were using ending sounds. I just used some foam letters to change the letters on the houses, so Maddox could match the picture on the gingerbread man to the house that it belonged to.