It's a no brainer to use this adorable WANTED poster for your kindergarten winter writing project.
Gingerbread decorating is a common winter theme, along with the exploration of Gingerbread related stories, so let's keep with the theme and create our own WANTED poster.
*As an Amazon affiliate, I may get a small commission for purchases made through links in this post.
The Runaway Gingerbread man is a famous story, but did you know there are many stories that have runaway gingerbread characters?
My kindergartners and I love the following stories to compare and contrast the following gingerbread stories (all perfect to inspire winter writing!):
Before writing, students will need to create their very own gingerbread people to decorate. You can use the template from the second page of the Kindergarten Winter Writing PDF to trace the gingerbread shape onto a piece of construction paper. If you have brown printer paper, you can also print it on that.
Items you'll need to decorate gingerbread people:
Kids added the following to their gingerbread:
Once our gingerbread people were dry, we chose our favorite color as a background for them. Then we discussed the most important parts of the gingerbread person. (This is a great opportunity to build vocabulary especially if teaching students who are still learning English.)
A great kindergarten writing prompt is labeling. (It also lends itself nicely to learning about diagrams, an important text feature in kindergarten.)
Labeling is very accessible to kindergartners because usually it requires the writing of only one word at a time, and children can usually name parts of different pictures on their own.
I use these labeling stickers from Target because they're super cheap ($1.99), and who doesn't love stickers?
I got the idea of doing a gingerbread wanted poster after reading these stories with my class in 2013. When making connections from the story to our own lives, a student retold the story of their dog running away and how their family made signs describing the dog to put up around the town.
This project was a spin on that idea. And it really makes a great "on the wall" kind of display to put up in the classroom or home.
Parents, if you're reading this, you might notice that when students are writing in my class, their words are not spelled correctly. They're spelled as they sound -phonetically.
The best kind of spelling to use at this age is phonetic spelling, and if you're curious about why I don't have kids spell things the "grown up way," I would highly suggest reading this post.
Before You Download:
I do share lots of free activities because teaching is hard enough as it is. In return please consider following me on Pinterest or Instagram to see more cute activities for you to use with your kiddos.
