Gingerbread Galore

I finally whipped up some gingerbread playdough for my kids, and I am so glad I did!  We have been reading tons of different versions of The Gingerbread Man, and they are totally obsessed.   It only took about 10 minutes to make, too.

Here is where I got the recipe from.  I doubled it to make enough for four kids to use at once, and dumped in a bunch of all four colors of food coloring to darken it up.

                                                  Source: sweetsugarbelle.com via Mary on Pinterest

I set up the center with some cookie cutters, googly eyes, cloth shapes, ribbon scraps and beads.

Instead of storing the playdough in one big regular tupperware container, I put it in four small twisty lid containers.  I am obsessed!  So much easier for them to take out and put away.  Since I started doing this the lid has never been left off, and fights about who got more have become few and far between.  Whoopie!

The model I made for them

Gingerbread face, tree and snowlady



Gingerbread monster, baby and a gingerbread man made without the cookie cutter... love the creativity!



Last but not least, we did a little gingerbread man experiment.  In most of the books we have read, the poor little cookie comes to a river that he cannot cross.  "But why can't he just swim across???" my little friends wanted to know.  So we decided to be gingebread scientists.  One gingerbread cookie stayed on the "dry land," the other went for a swim in our "river."  They were fascinated by how gross and crumbly the cookie got, and really seemed to understand why the poor gingerbread man had to hitch a ride with the sly fox.

The cookies are "Mini Gingerbread Men" from Trader Joe's.