-by Mimi Rothschild

One of the benefits of homeschooling for Christian families is that we can keep Christ in Christmas, and certainly our studies at Christmastime should focus on Jesus, the reason for the season.

We can also enjoy the elements of our national Christmas celebration that have grown up with our country. One of these is gingerbread. When you need to take a baking day, keep it a learning day, too, by using this fun topic to review skills and lessons in many subject areas.

Reading

•    Read the story of “The Gingerbread Boy” and then have your older children retell it to the younger ones.

•    If you have enough cookie cutters, make the gingerbread boy, the little old woman, the little old man, and all the animals that chased the gingerbread boy. Use a set to retell the story before eating them!

•    At the library or online, read as many different versions of the story as you can find. Make a chart of the similarities and differences.
Math

•    Baking gives so many excellent opportunities to practice math: measurement, fractions (for more advanced students, double or triple the recipe and get practice in calculating with fractions, too!), time, counting, and even basic multiplication and division (how many rows should you put on the pan to make a dozen cookies at once?).

•    Count out cookies into storage bags or containers for good counting practice that can also help you end up with well-filled cookie boxes or bags for your friends and delivery people.

•    Get more complicated math practice by building a gingerbread house. Encourage the kids to measure and plan their building and decorations to get the most math (and the longest quiet time for you to get those cookies wrapped up) out of this activity.
Social Studies

•    For each of the ingredients in the recipe, find out how it is made, what the raw materials are, and where they come from. Cinnamon and ginger were precious spices from exotic foreign lands when Americans first started making gingerbread, and housewives might have ground their own flour. How does that compare with the journey from raw materials to finished cookies today?

•    This story is found in the United States, England, Norway, and Germany. Find these countries on a map or globe.
Character

•    The gingerbread boy in the story is naughty in running away, and he becomes more and more proud and boastful as he goes through the story, saying “I ran away from the little old woman and the little old man” and listing the animals, finishing up, “…and I can run away from you, too!” He makes the unwise decision to trust the fox and accept a ride across the river from him. In the end, he is eaten by the fox. There’s a lesson here about pride and about risky behavior.

•    On the other hand, if you don’t like seeing the gingerbread boy eaten up, you can take a leaf from Jan Brett’s Gingerbread Baby, in which the runaway gingerbread boy is rescued and given a gingerbread house to live in. Remind your children that we are rescued by Jesus from our sins, even when we make bad decisions. The same thing happened to the gingerbread baby in Brett’s modern story.

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Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of LearningByGrace.org the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.