Winter Project Based Learning Activities Kids Will Love
The winter months can be a challenge in the classroom. Everyone is antsy from being cooped up inside and everyone is getting excited about winter break. However, you still have a few weeks of school before winter break and you need to keep your students on task engaged in learning.
That is why I created these fun and engaging winter project based learning unit activities that focus on designing, decorating, and selling a gingerbread house! Gingerbread houses are fun, creative, and perfect for the winter season!
Get Students Excited About Gingerbread Houses
Get your students excited about learning by looking at pictures of gingerbread houses, or reading gingerbread-themed books. Encourage them to notice how gingerbread houses are decorated, and what designs they like the most. Then have students do a little research of their own to gather gingerbread house design and decoration ideas.
This gingerbread house PBL project has many activities, but they can be grouped into two main categories:
- Design and Decorate the Exterior and Interior of Your Gingerbread House
- Write a Descriptive Real Estate Listing to Sell Your Gingerbread House
Designing Your Gingerbread House
The first section of this winter project-based learning unit is all about designing and decorating a gingerbread house. In this section, I incorporate the math skills of addition, multiplication, data collection, graphing, area, and perimeter.
In the design section of this PBL unit, students get to come up with their own unique gingerbread house design using a menu of decoration and building supplies and add up the cost of the supplies they used. Then, they will draw and color in their gingerbread house using the medium of their choice.
Next, they will gather data to create a bar graph to show the quantity or cost of the supplies they used.
Finally, they will create a floor plan with rooms specially designed for a gingerbread family and calculate the area and perimeter of each room.
Students love getting a chance to be creative, and these high-interest activities really get them engaged in applying math skills to their gingerbread house design.
Describing Your Gingerbread House
The second section of this winter project-based learning unit focuses on writing skills. The skills I include in this section are parts of speech, sensory words, descriptive writing, organizing writing, and following a writing outline.
Students will start off by brainstorming nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that could be used to describe their gingerbread house. This is a great opportunity to review parts of speech and categorize words into their parts of speech in a meaningful way. Much more fun than the usual grammar worksheet!
Then students will imagine they are in their gingerbread house and use their five senses to come up with sensory words to describe their gingerbread house.
Gingerbread House Real Estate Listing
Finally, the most exciting activity, writing the real estate listing to sell their gingerbread house! I share with students the 5 parts of a real estate listing, and how to write a real estate listing that paints a picture of the house, and makes the reader want to learn more. Then, students will write their own descriptive real estate listing all about their gingerbread house. I like to give my students paper with places to draw pictures of their gingerbread house, just like real-world home listings have!
You could wrap up the activities there, but I like to end the unit with a creative project to display the students’ work for others to see. You could make booklets, a bulletin board display, or mount students’ work on colored paper to hang in the hallway.
Winter Project Based Learning Gingerbread Extensions
There are so many fun activities you could do to continue the gingerbread theme into your learning activities. Here are a few of my favorites:
- build gingerbread houses with milk cartons and graham crackers
- use cardboard to create 3D gingerbread house models
- write a story about the gingerbread family that bought your gingerbread house.
- have a gingerbread taste test and graph the results
Interested in learning more about these winter project based learning activities and getting the whole unit created, planned out, and ready to go? You can grab all the information and printables for this math and writing gingerbread house unit by clicking here or clicking the image below.
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