Make some gingerbread man learning cards for all sorts of playful learning games for kids! Use them to learn phonics, sight words, numeral recognition and number problems too, in a fun baking themed play set up which kids will love.
We’ve been doing lots of gingerbread man themed play and learning activities recently and we have more to share soon too! Those little faces are just so adorable and they make for perfect pretend play and learning, what’s not to love?!
Here is our Gingerbread Man Sensory Learning Tray that we made for letter tracing and practising writing sight words in. It felt and smelt wonderful!
I traced around our gingerbread man cutter onto thin cardboard and cut out lots of them to turn into little gingerbread man learning cards. Around outlined around the edges of these using the white pen from my new favourite Posca paint pen set, then added the learning details to each one (after adding a smiley face too!)
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On the first set I wrote the letters from my 3 year old’s name so that she could practise recognising and sounding those out, then putting them into the right order to spell out her name in the right order. (There are more of these too, her name isn’t “able” ha!)
To play the game we popped them into a banking tray with a little wooden spatula (this is from theMelissa & Doug kitchen accessory set
“Can you find the cookie that says “aaaaaaaa”, pick up the gingerbread man that says “llll” etc. It’s important to emphasise the letter sound, the phoneme, rather than the letter name, as this helps with phonetic understanding and emergent reading which follows.
For the bigger girls I asked them which of the sight words and high frequency words they found a little tricky when reading, and more likely when writing independently. They gave me a list and then we made them some gingerbread man sight word learning cards to match. 
Again, we popped them onto the baking tray and played the cutting, cooking and flipping game which they still enjoyed at ages 5 and 7. Call out “who can find the gingerbread man who has “once” on his tummy?! “How about “people, because and about”? “Can you find some words to make a sentence?”
Another step is is to make some alphabet gingerbread man that correspond with the sight words, so that the child can take a word card and then find all of the letters that they will need to spell it out.
As a final fun challenge, we made some more gingerbread man learning cards to try some maths games! I wrote some addition and subtraction maths problems onto the gingerbread man cards, ranging from super simple e.g. 1 + 2 to more tricky e.g. 30+ 18. They flipped these over to see the answers after using some mental maths and empty number line strategies to work them out!
You could use these in many more ways too, from shapes to emotions, French vocabulary to pattern matching!
How would you use theses gingerbread man learning cards? I hope you’re inspired to add some to your learning areas at home or in the classroom too! Once this game has been finished with you can pop it in a zip-lic bag and use it as a busy bag when out and about or travelling too!
What they are learning while they play:
Literacy: phoneme-grapheme correspondence, recognising letters by sight, name recognition and spelling, building and decoding CVC words, recognising and reading sight words and high frequency words, building simple sentences
Maths: recognising numerals, working out simple maths problems using mental maths strategies
See our extensive PLAYFUL LITERACY archives for loads more hands-on, fun learning ideas for toddlers, preschoolers and school age kids!
Here are some more gingerbread themed learning ideas to try too!
Gingerbread Sensory Writing Tray
Gingerbread Clay for ornaments
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These are so cute! My daughter loves to pretend to bake (and really bake, of course!) and this would be a fun way to practice her sight words and letters.