Gingerbread Man Loose in Junior Kindergarten: A Collaboration between literacy and technology

 When I think about collaboration at my school library it is collaboration between teacher or students. For this project, I thought about collaboration between literacy and technology and between students and the classic tale of the gingerbread man.

Several years ago the librarians and the technology teachers advocated for the creation of one department where literacy and library skills were merged and taught with technology education skills in a project based environment. We have created a curriculum that weaves different concepts of literacy and introducing technology and making.

One of the grade levels I work with is junior kindergarten, four year olds. When they first start the school year in September it is a big adjustment. A new classroom, teachers, friends as well as being in a huge building with older students. I always start the school year easing into the library space and how JK students use it. We start with storytime and story sharing and giving students plenty of time to explore the space and find a book for the week. We read lots of different types of picture books and nonfiction books to explore and talk about. As the school year moves into November, I start to do a short project connected to a book we read. Then we expand to reading a book or two one week and then doing a project connected to the book the next week. For the first big junior kindergarten project of this year, I developed a three week long gingerbread themed project!

The project started with reading and exploring different versions of the story of the Gingerbread Man. We read the Gingerbread Man by JIm Aylesworth, a more traditional version of the book. Students talked about the sequence of the events of the story and made connections with the characters and setting. The next version we read was Gingerbread Man Loose in the School by Laura Murray. This is a funny version of the gingerbread man searching the school to find his class. Again, students made connections with the sequence of events and the characters. They then made connections with the places in the story and our own school. We talked about the different spaces they go to for art and PE, the nurse when they need help and the library.

The next week when students came to the library I introduced our robot gingerbread activity. I talked about how we give code or instructions to robots to make them move. I showed them our Ozobot robots. Ozobot robots read marker paths to follow directions and paths. For their activity, I covered our tables with white butcher paper and printed out sets of pictures from the different places in the story The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School. Students worked together to put the pictures from the book in order of the events of the story. Then they drew lines from the different pictures. I made copies of pictures of the main character and taped them to the top of the Ozobot robots. Students then had the gingerbread man robots travel to the places while retelling the story. Junior kindergarteners worked with each other to remember the details of the story, make their gingerbread robots move and have fun retelling the story.

The next week, we introduced the laser cutter we have in the library. Our glowforge laser cutter reads files and then uses the laser robotic arm to follow the design and cut into the materials. I set the laser cutter working to cut gingerbread shapes out of the draft board. Each student received their own laser cut gingerbread person to decorate with pom pom balls, stickers, markers and googly eyes. Junior kindergarten students were able to take their gingerbread person characters home to retell the story of the Gingerbread Man Loose in the School or make their own gingerbread person stories.

This project was fun to do with my junior kindergarteners as a longer project. It was a good connection with literacy and technology concepts and ideas. Students made some connections with their own school experiences and what they read in the book. Students also worked together to recall details from the story and program and code their gingerbread man robots to move and finally they were able to take what they had learned and create something new to share with their families.