The holiday season is the perfect time to use these 9 printable Gingerbread worksheets and activities. These gingerbread man activities are a great way to focus on improving phonics and fluency in the month of December, for your Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade students. The gingerbread activities are a great addition to small groups, literacy centers, or partner work. If you’re someone who likes to read a gingerbread man story, or a few, to your students in December, you’re going to love these gingerbread themed activities. Kids usually love hearing all the tales of the gingerbread man. They will be eager to see the gingerbread theme continue in fun ways as they complete the gingerbread worksheets and activities! Keep reading to find out how you can use these printable gingerbread worksheets and hands-on activities to focus on the important skills of decoding and fluency.
9 Phonics Patterns Included in the Gingerbread Worksheets
First up, I wanted to share that these gingerbread worksheets and activities work great for all your readers with the 9 phonics patterns included. I like to make sure all readers have something appropriate for their abilities. It also makes differentiation that much simpler for you when all students can complete the same activity, but with different content.
The 9 phonics patterns included in the gingerbread worksheets and activities are:
- CVC words
- Digraphs
- Beginning Blends
- Ending Blends
- Added Endings
- CVCe words
- R-controlled Vowels
- Vowel Teams/ Long Vowel Sounds
- Diphthongs
So all of your students will have something to work on with these fun gingerbread men themed activities! The decodable words, sentences, and short stories follow a scope and sequence in the order listed above. Students will have the opportunity to advance to the various more challenging phonics pattern as they progress through these gingerbread worksheets and activities.
Whether working with Kindergarten, first grade students, or second graders, you’ll find something for all of your readers within this gingerbread pack! If you’re someone who has 3rd grade intervention groups, you will find that these gingerbread worksheets and activities are a great way to help readers improve their decoding skills, as well.
How to Use the Worksheets and Activities
No lesson plans are really needed to explain how to use the worksheets and activities. It’s as simple as print and use with each of your small groups, literacy centers, or partner activities. Each phonics pattern comes with 4 pages with a gingerbread theme. These gingerbread worksheets are a great way to help your readers improve their phonics and fluency skills in fun ways!
The pages included for each phonics pattern are:
- words
- sentences
- short stories
- game board
Students will work in a gradual manner as they focus on building their decoding and fluency skills. It’s important to start at the word level and then build up to passages when it comes to focusing on fluency. These gingerbread printables allow you to do exactly that!
Using the Gingerbread Worksheets
Students will first decode the words, then the sentences, followed by the short stories. The decodable sentences, and short stories also include sight words that your students most likely already can read. They can then play the gingerbread theme game with a partner or small group. For the game board, you’ll simply need to add little character pieces and a die for the students to play.
Up Engagement
One great idea to make this even more engaging is to have students create their own game pieces using gingerbread man templates. They can create their own small gingerbread boy or girl, cut it out, and glue to a popsicle stick to use for their own personalized game piece. They can also use these as special pointers as they read through the words, sentences, and short stories!
As you’re reading the story of the gingerbread man in your classroom, you can continue the fun with these gingerbread printables. Kids will be so excited to see the gingerbread house and gingerbread man in these fun activities. With the addition of the game board, students don’t even realize how much they’re working on their reading skills because of all the fun they’re having!
Hands-on activities where students are pointing to the words as they’re reading, and rolling the die and moving character pieces during the game allow primary students to work on building their fine motor skills, too!
Holiday Bundle
If you’re someone who likes to keep things consistent month after month, you’ll want to check out my holiday bundle! The holiday bundle includes the same setup of phonics games and fluency activities with each fun holiday theme. You’ll not only be set for multiple months of the school year with this single purchase, but your students will also already know how to complete each worksheet and activity. That’s a win-win for everyone! Plus, you save money when you purchase the bundle as it is 20% off!
The six holidays included in the bundle are:
- Halloween
- Thanksgiving
- Gingerbread
- Christmas
- Valentine’s Day
- St. Patrick’s Day
Grab the holiday bundle so you’re set for each month of the year!
More Phonics and Fluency Activities
Want to learn more about these phonics games and fluency activities? Read more about these phonics games and fluency activities!
You might not be sure where to begin with your readers for these gingerbread worksheets and activities. Assess your readers to determine which phonics pattern is best to begin with using these phonics quick checks free printables! This printable PDF file provides all the directions to get started with the assessment. Once you assess your students with these free printables, you’ll feel confident in each readers’ abilities with each of the nine phonics patterns included in the gingerbread worksheets!
