Free Materials For Teachers

Image©2011 ABS Happy Holidays card with gingerbread house
Finished Online House
Wouldn’t it be great if you could make gingerbread houses without all the messy clean-up? Well, you can with the Gingerbread House activity, in either the Annie’s Books Online or the IntelliTools Classroom Suite® versions. New for 2012: Gingerbread House for Clicker 5® !

Gingerbread House Online Versions
The Annie’s Books Online version takes you step by step through building a gingerbread house and decorating it. The many decoration choices produce 27 different beautiful gingerbread house scenes. The final image shows off your house in the snow with a gingerbread family wishing you “Happy Holidays!”

Image©2011 ABS Pattern pieces positioned on the gingerbread.
Preparing To Cut The Pieces
You can print the final image as a holiday card, too! The link is at the foot of this page. There is also a link to an online Gingerbread House Puzzle. Use the Preview button in the description for a sneak peek! Both online activities are simple enough for young children, but will bring a smile to any age.

Clicker 5 Gingerbread House
In Clicker 5 you can create all 27 gingerbread house scenes, just like in Annie’s Books Online. The final scene has the gingerbread family and falling snow. Special thanks to Janet Beyersdorfer for requesting a Clicker version of the Gingerbread House. She’s now tried it out in Clicker 6, and it works beautifully there!

The falling snow animation is a multi-image gif graphic, and it plays when a cell has Speak text in cell active. If you didn’t know you could run animations in Clicker 5, take a look at the settings.

Classroom Suite Gingerbread House
In the ICS version, the first part of the activity takes you through the steps to build a gingerbread house, frost the roof, and decorate the windows and door. At that point, it takes a different route from the Annie’s Books Online and Clicker 5 versions.

Image©2011 ABS Screenshot of the decorating page in Classroom Suite.
Decorating The Roof In Classroom Suite
Students get a chance to decorate the roof any way they choose by adding colorful clip art candy from toolbars. When they click All Done, they see their creation in a snow scene. They also are rewarded by an animated gingerbread family waving at them!

At that point, students can save or print the picture. But they also have the option to go one step further and turn their picture into a holiday card. They can personalize the card by filling in the To: and From: text boxes directly, with IntelliKeys®, or by using the onscreen keyboard.

Image©2011 ABS Screenshot of Gingerbread house
Making A Card In ICS

In addition to the main activity, there is a simple six piece gingerbread house puzzle. There are original overlays attached for students using IntelliKeys®, and a Dynavox® package version of the overlays to run the activities from Dynavox AAC devices. See the Special Needs Access section on the System Reqs page for information on controlling the Classroom Suite version activities from PRC devices.

Bonus: Gingerbread House Clip Art
The clip art collection you can download from this page includes all the button art and all 27 fancy gingerbread houses. These can be used in many ways for off-computer games and for communication. And, if you attempt a real gingerbread house, there are great decorating ideas right there in the clip art collection!

Applications needed: Browser, IntelliTools Classroom Suite, Clicker 5.
Subject areas: Holiday, Reading, Life Skills.
Level: K-Grade 3.


Online Links-Activities

Gingerbread House link: gingerbread/index.html Gingerbread House activity to read and complete online. For details on using Annie’s Books Online, click here.

Puzzles

Gingerbread House link: CLICK HERE. Gingerbread House online puzzle. Image is a scene from the Gingerbread House activity.

For details on using Annie’s Puzzles Online, click here.


Downloads-Activities

Classroom Suite

GingerbreadSuite.zip (26.6 MB) Gingerbread House activities in Classroom Suite v.3 or later. Includes the main Gingerbread House activity and a simple puzzle. Custom IntelliKeys overlays attached.

GingerbreadDynavox.zip (458 KB) Gingerbread House activity overlays saved as Dynavox package files.

Clicker 5

GingerbreadHouse.clkt.zip (14.2 MB) Gingerbread House for Clicker 5 or later.

Downloads-Resources

GingerbreadClipArt.zip (7.6 MB) Collection of original clip art including 27 finished gingerbread house designs in JPEG format. To preview the collection, click here.

December 1st, 2012 at 5:59 am
2 Responses to “Gingerbread House 2012”

  1. 1

    Annie–

    I would love to use your Gingerbread House activity with my special ed classes. However, the online books load very slowly on our usually very fast iMacs with OS 10.6. Do you have or would you consider making this in Clicker 5 or 6?

    Janet

  2. 2
    admin Says:

    Janet, you have inspired me. I’ve been working on Clicker 5 and HyperStudio 5 versions of Holiday Tree, and some holiday lotto games for Classroom Suite. But I had all the artwork for a Clicker 5 version of Gingerbread House ready to go…so your wish is my command! There is now a Clicker 5 version on this page to download, and I’m sure others will benefit from your request.

    About using the online version: Unfortunately, no matter how fast your computer is, anything online depends on the bandwidth of your connection and the traffic level at the time you try to access the materials. That’s both the traffic level on your connection, which could be quite high on a school network, and the traffic level on the web in general. I actually composed the online version on an iMac, and it runs instantaneously there. It’s a teeny bit slower on my server with my online connection. But there is only one other user on my connection, plus I live in Utah, which has a relatively small population. You are in a more urban environment, so you are just getting a slow trickle.
    Thanks again for your request!

 

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