Gingerbread and Meeting Those Common Cores...

Hey everyone…Lindsey here and I am slowly coming out of my shopping exhaustion and starting to prepare for next week.

I am having a hard time pulling myself out of my weekend to focus on work but I know it will be Sunday night and I will be regretting my laziness so I better hop to it!

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the gingerbread stories. Aren’t they fantastic???? There are so many versions, some that are just hilarious, and are great for so many different 2nd grade common cores! This is just a glimpse of the amount of these stories that I have. The first thing we are reviewing, because I already taught it but they can ALWAYS use a review, is retelling. Not only do I look for key details in their retells but I also am looking for their descriptions. How well can they describe the beginning? Middle? End? Are they summarizing or retelling? We work on this in both reading groups and whole group.

I also love these stories for problem and solution. There is enough variation in the different versions that the problem and solution can have a little variety while being similar enough to understand the concept.

We use this organizer to keep track of these two concepts for different versions of the story.

Now you may be saying to yourself…you read all those stories???? How do you keep track???? WEEELLLL… we use a process grid of course!

I keep track of all the different stories on this GLAD chart. Now, the students also have a smaller version of this chart. I DON’T have them fill it out for every story! Believe me…hearing “my hand hurts” over and over again is no fun! I do have them fill out some significant versions like the basic Gingerbread Boy, the Gingerbread Girl, The Runaway Pancake, etc. I like them to have a variety because they will take ALL of this information and create their own gingerbread story. Already with these stories we are hitting retelling, problem and solution and story structure. BUT we aren’t finished!!

One of the most difficult cores for me is comparing and contrasting two versions of the same story. The reason this is so difficult is because they need to be able to do this while reading a grade level text. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough books to allow the class to do this. AND finding good books for this concept is hard. Informational…no problem. Literature…big problem.

Enter some passages to save the day!

These are our gingerbread passages. We made two versions of the gingerbread story. There is The Gingerbread Man and The Gingerbread Shark. I can give the kiddos a copy of both and they can read them and compare all on their own. Voila! Now, I like to use the T-chart over a the Venn diagram but we included both versions in our packet. These passages are also leveled which allows me to have them reading a grade level passage and demonstrating if they can meet the core. It also allows me to give out different levels, I usually copy them all on the same color, so that those who can’t read a grade level text can still feel successful without standing out as having a different passage.

If you are interested in these Gingerbread stories you can click on the picture:)

We focus on gingerbread stories for two weeks because we take it into our writing as well. I’m telling you…these books cover so much! Then we will spend the last week before break focusing on different holidays around the world. This helps to keep those kiddos engaged when they are getting a little antsy! If you focus on holidays around the world make sure to check out our passage sets for those as well!