The Gingerbread Man

Well, I’m quite fond of gingerbread…but apart from that I love the idea of the gingerbread boy running away and the chance for children to repeat the favourite line alongside the reader -  ‘Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man’. It never fails to catch on and I can remember joining in with my own Dad when he read the story at bedtime. Of course, the gingerbread man is still famous these days for appearing in the film Shrek!

We made gingerbread men of course, decorated and ate them, pretending to be the fox at the end. The children also designed and decorated gingerbread houses in groups at Christmas, linking to German Christmas traditions. We also made puppets of the characters and retold the story using a puppet theatre. The story lends itself well to drama sessions and creative retelling of the story using other animals etc. We made large 3D maps using boxes and also drew maps of the forest in the story.