the gingerbread man...

A beloved member of the kindergarten class is the Gingerbread Man.  He makes appearances at the beginning of the year to help teach the kids their shapes, and then periodically throughout the first half of the school year to read his book and play shape games with them.  Unfortunately, in December, the Gingerbread Man ran away!  A cry for help went out the the families and friends and relatives of the kindergarteners to help look for the Gingerbread Man, and then write letters to the class telling them where they saw them.  Then in January, when the class studied different continents, they were so surprised to find out from the letters that the Gingerbread Man was traveling the globe and had been seen in Africa, Europe, North America, and South America!  At the end of the month, the Gingerbread Man returned to the classroom excited to tell the class about his adventures.  But being that he had so much fun traveling, he did not want to stay in the classroom anymore.  So he started traveling to each kindergarteners home, and they had to help keep track of his adventures by writing about them in a big binder that held plenty of paper to write on, all of his world traveling letters, his book, and a nice spot for him to travel to and from school.  The kindergarteners were reminded that the Gingerbread Man was a guest in their homes and they should be polite and treat him as they would any other guest.

G was beyond excited to finally have her turn to take the Gingerbread Man home, and took the responsibility of hosting him very seriously!  She took him along wherever we went, made sure she included him when she played, and introduced him nicely to the hairdresser, our neighbor, and her dogs.

G also set a place for him at the table to eat, and made him a comfortable bed to sleep in!

And here is what she wrote about his adventures at our house:  March 8.  The Gingerbread Man slept in my room.  I played the shape game with my brother and my mom.  I took him to Molly and Kacie's house.  They are dogs.  He went to my haircut with me.

G really likes to write little stories and journal and has been doing some outside work on this at school once a week since October.  G and a couple classmates would head to Mrs. K's room on Friday mornings, and had to write 2 sentences about anything they liked, as well as draw a picture about them.  The one rule was that the teacher would not help spell words for them (something that S and I do all the time for her, and are stopping most of that now! =), they had to sound the words out.  They also learned about simple sentence structure along the way too with spaces between words and periods at the end.  She is finished with that now, and we got a big book home with her page from each week.  It was so neat to see the progress that she made throughout the months she did that!  After seeing her journal from school and how she loved this Gingerbread Man project, we will definitely be doing more of this with her at home!