Virtual Book Club for Kids – Jan Brett

It’s time again for the Virtual Book Club for Kids and this months author is Jan Brett, an American author and illustrator her books are being added to our book shelves regularly because of the beautiful illustrations and stories that she tells. Of Jan Brett’s many books we have chosen Gingerbread Friends this month and have created our own Mommy and Me Book Club with one of my friends and their 2 children who are the same age as J and T so we have created a few activities based on the book which I will share of the next week or so.

Gingerbread Friends – Paper Chain of Friends

Inspired by Red Ted Art’s Gingerbread Men Stand Up Cards which she posted as part of the Creative Christmas Countdown (check out our Santa’s Plate that we also made as part of the Countdown) and adapted it slightly to create a Paper Chain of Gingerbread Friends to go with the book.

Materials needed to make a Paper Chain of Friends

Brown Card
Scissors
Pens and Pencils
Glitter Glue
Sequins, Jewels, Buttons and extras to decorate the Gingerbread Friends with
Sticky Tape

How to make the Gingerbread Friends Paper Chain

As a bit of parent prep before J and T started crafting I created the paper chains of gingerbread friends – to do this I cut of piece of brown card in half then concertina folded the half into eighths. Once it was folded with the visible fold as the inside of the gingerbread man I drew an outline of half a gingerbread man (Red Ted Art suggests using a cookie cutter to get a good outline) and then cut it out. When unfolded it produced 4 little gingerbread men holding hands – to make sure that they hold hands the outside of the hand must be placed along the edge of the paper and not cut into.

Setting up the table as a creation station with everything that the children could need to create the gingerbread men J and T set about decorating their gingerbread friends, drawing faces on them, decorating them with glitter glue.

We then set them to dry and once dry I used sticky tape to connect the different sets of men together and added them as decoration with our paper chains to our dinning room.

This is Part of the Virtual Book Club for kids – check out the hosts over on Toddler Approved and then pick up a Jan Brett book and join in – come up with a craft, recipe, fun activity, outdoor fun that you can do – write about it or come and join us over on our facebook page and then link up to the linky below.

 Do you remember creating paper doll chains as a child?