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Do you love using The Gingerbread Man story in your therapy sessions? It is great for teaching oral narration and language skills. Over the years, I have even found ways to incorporate social pragmatic skills with the story! Today, I wanted to share some gingerbread man speech therapy activities you can do with your students in December or January.
Using the book The Gingerbread Man, you can work on oral narration and comprehension. Another way to build language is to compare and contrast different versions of The Gingerbread Man.
Here are some book versions that you can use in therapy (Amazon affiliate links included):
I love literacy-based speech therapy sessions because you can use the book before, during, and after to review speech and language goals. Here are some gingerbread man speech therapy activities you can do after reading the book:
One gingerbread man speech therapy activity that is very FUNctional is decorating gingerbread man cookies. This gingerbread man therapy activity takes a little prep of making the cookies, but then it serves as a motivational lesson that you can cover lots of goals:
I found these different-sized cookie cutters, so we also worked on big, bigger, and bigger. Students working on articulation carryover can practice their speech sounds while explaining how they decorated their gingerbread man cookies, or use these no-prep articulation worksheets.
Decorating gingerbread man cookies for someone else is a great way to work on perspective-taking, initiation of conversation, follow-up comments/questions, clarifying, and more!
When using an articulation or language flashcard deck (we provide themed articulation flashcards in the Themed Therapy SLP membership) with your mixed groups, you can make the deck more engaging by planning the “Catch the Gingerbread Man” game. All you need are free gingerbread men and fox printables, paper clips, and a magnetic wand. Attach gingerbread men to most of the task cards. Put a few foxes under the cards. Then, students pick a card with the magnetic wand. If it has a gingerbread man, they get to keep it. If it has a fox, then they lose a card.
For your students that need movement to help them stay engaged, I highly recommend these Gingerbread Man brain breaks and songs videos on YouTube.
This allows your students a quick time to get their wiggles out while still moving their bodies to something related to The Gingerbread Man theme.
The second YouTube video puts some verbs from the story in song form which may help some of your students with learning that vocabulary.
I love incorporating YouTube videos into my whole class push-in lessons to break up the session. What YouTube videos do you like to use in therapy for a Gingerbread Man?
Incorporating science and STEM activities into your gingerbread man speech therapy activities unit is a great way to adapt this theme for older students!
Older students love science and STEM, and there are many ways you can work on different language skills, such as problem-solving, vocabulary, making predictions, and summarizing.
Here are some ideas for STEM and science activities you can do for small groups or whole class lessons:
Many of my students struggle with sitting on the carpet for whole class lessons or at a table. So, after I do a book, or we do an activity, I mix up the session with a fun themed song. It’s great when the song has actions related to the theme. These songs show how to bake gingerbread man cookies. You can target verb actions while singing and dancing to the songs. Here are some of my favorite gingerbread man songs for speech therapy sessions:
To work on story retell using The Gingerbread Man, use file folder activities to help scaffold oral narration.
Some of your students may need step-by-step visual supports with what happened in the story. For SLPs doing teletherapy or using their iPad, using the Boom Card version for The Gingerbread Man story retell can be an easy Gingerbread Man lesson plan.
You may have some students with complex communication needs and need additional supports to help them demonstrate their comprehension of the story. You can have your students match characters or story elements if they can’t verbally sequence the story.
For students working on increasing MLU, have them use the visual sentence frames to build sentences about “who” was chasing the gingerbread man.
Work on story retelling using visual supports in a gingerbread man speech therapy sensory bin with these free printables! Not only can you work on The Gingerbread Man story retelling, but you can also cover comprehension, verb tense, vocabulary and more!
The gingerbread man loves to be chased. And it seems to be quite hard to catch him. Planning a body in the group gingerbread man chase around campus can be a practical way for you to work on staying with a group and thinking about others. Plus, you can work on LOTS of other social pragmatic language skills as a whole class.
If you are doing teletherapy, you can use this Gingerbread Man Google Slides™ included in the Gingerbread Man Push-In Language Lesson Plan guides to have all your book read alouds, brain breaks, videos, and digital materials organized so you can easily get to the activity you want to use. You can link to websites and other materials on the Google Slide as well. I will often add Boom Card links, YouTube videos, or websites that have fun gingerbread man games like ABCya.
When I plan push-in lessons for my K-1 and 1-2 Special Day Classrooms, I like to read a storybook at the carpet and do a Google Slide presentation as a group.
Then, the class breaks up into three smaller group workstations. I plan three activities that align with the theme of the week and use the teacher and aides to help with running stations. You can setup your push-in lessons in a similar structure or figure out a different collaborative service model to use.
At the stations, you can plan an easy craft, use the characters from the story to work on prepositions while playing “Simon says”, and a pretend play cookie baking station to work on language and social skills functionally.
If you need lesson plan guides that will help you implement small group and whole class lessons, my gingerbread man push-in guides has 3-5 small group activities, book suggestions, a letter to send home to parents, a Google Slide presentation and cheat sheet guides for the teacher aides. We also have a mini-themed unit in the Themed Therapy SLP membership for December with Gingerbread Man speech therapy activities.
These are the activities you can do with a gingerbread man theme. What do you plan for your students? Share in the comments!
