Oh, we FINALLY got to our Virtual Book Club for Kids project for the month of December! We were going to do it before Christmas break but Brynne ended up with the flu that had us quitting school a couple of days early.
We completed our lessons today and had a great time! This month's author was Jan Brett.
We read the book Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. (We also read The Hat, which was lots of fun. The illustrations in these two books are fabulous!!)
Of COURSE one of our activities had to be making gingerbread men. We used the recipe directly from the pages of the book.
Our other activities included Gingerbread Math. And we had a great time with it! We used a printable called Gingerbread Geometry, and we used our pre-Christmas gingerbread house as our subject. I have kept it well after Christmas for this exact purpose.
We have been learning about measurement in math, anyway, so these lessons flowed perfectly. We have been watching Study Jams videos and reading many of the Math Monsters books. With these lessons we added perimeter and area.
The first thing we did was to determine the perimeter of our own house by using a previously-learned unit of measurement ... the "foot". We paced off the front and side of our house and then came in to add up the perimeter in feet.
Then we used those figures to determine the area of our house.
We grabbed our old gingerbread house and determined how we would measure the perimeter and area. The kids had a great idea ... use the feet of their toys! They each used a toy to determine the perimeter measurements in "feet". Then they calculated the area.
The last way we measured was with a ruler. Brynne measured in centimeters and Eli measured in inches. They did such good work!! I was really impressed!
This month it's on to the author David McPhail.
I love the idea of incorporating geometry! Hmmm...maybe we'll have to re-read this one just for an excuse to eat gingerbread...I mean, the chance for D to use his new tape measure. :)
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