Gingerbread City!

We have been learning all about fairytales. One of our favourite fairytales is Hansel and Gretel. As you probably know, in Hansel and Gretel, the witch lives in a house made of Gingerbread. We decided to make our own Gingerbread Houses as part of our Topic learning. We turned this idea into a mini-inquiry project. In groups, we had to find a recipe for gingerbread houses that we thought would be the best. 

We had to compare recipes and identify the one we thought would be the most simple and create the best gingerbread houses. We then had to create a shopping list, with all our ingredients and make a budget for our group. Next, we had to practise our phone conversation skills, as we rang several companies to ask them to donate ingredients to keep our costs as low as possible. We were so excited to be donated 4 dozen eggs from Farmer Brown and 20kgs of flour from Western Milling!  We began the creation process – in our groups, we had to follow our chosen recipe and create our gingerbread. We all did a great job of following the recipes and the class smelled delicious all day! The problems we faced were that we had underestimated how much gingerbread would be needed for each house and we ran out of butter, so we couldn’t make enough for every person. Luckily, Mrs Davies was able to work with the people who didn’t get their gingerbread and make some more with them. The second problem we faced was that it all took a lot longer than we expected. We got the gingerbread made really quickly, but the rolling of the gingerbread and cutting out of the templates took way too long. We took home our Gingerbread to cook over the weekend (we only have one oven at school, so couldn't cook them all here!), then brought them back. We then stuck them together with royal icing, then decorated them with lollies! 

We had an amazing time and we were SO proud of our creations! As well as being a great fairytale inquiry project, it will also be a stunning centre piece for our tables at Christmas time! Did you know that in America and Canada, it is a tradition to make a gingerbread house every year for Christmas? Maybe we could start this tradition in New Zealand too!