We read several different versions of the fairy tale "The Gingerbread Boy" to work on doing some text to text connections/comparisons (sorry - teacher talk) so I used this old trick to make some Gingerbread dolls with the kids faces on them. Gingerbread is perfect around the holidays because it can be festive without alienating anyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas religiously (which is a good portion of my class). We can also carry on the theme to decorate Gingerbread cookies, which is a perfect last-day-of-school-before-the-holidays activitiy.
I pre-cut the bodies from donated white t-shirt fabric, and in small groups (3/4 kids) I showed the children how to put gel medium on the heads and stick a photocopy of their face on, ink side down. Convincing the children to glue their faces on ink-down was not easy. They were like "Ms. R's gone crazy."
As the gel medium dries, it sucks the ink off the paper from the photocopy.
When it is completely dry (like, the next day) the kids used warm water to wet and gently rub away the paper from the photocopy. The ink of the copied image (their face) is left behind in the gel medium.
Watered down acrylic paint to colour the fabric.
Permanent markers for details, and a whip around on Ms. Rowley's sewing machine. We stuffed them with the foam from our rest-time mats that had gotten damaged or ripped. Gingerbread me!
