Teams of seventh-grade students were given gingerbread house kits to build donated to the school by B2 Bargain Bins. But building the house is only part of the lesson. Students will also be working on interior designs for the homes using scale drawings for rooms and furnishings.
Peyton Morgan said she would have never guessed she would ever be building a gingerbread house in her middle school math class. “It’s fun and different,” she said as she unpacked the gingerbread pieces.
The structures came complete with the festive decorations to adorn the windows, roofs and yards of the projects. Brayden Church showed his experience in building gingerbread houses before as he precisely applied just the right amount of icing to cement the walls together.
His classmate Reese Kinne helped hold the walls in place as the icing dried. “It smells so good. I just want to eat it,” said Kinne.
Mia Gosselin said she builds about four gingerbread houses each year “just because I like to.”
Her group fanned the structure with pieces of cardboard to help the icing dry faster so they could get to decorating it.
About half of the structures were actually built and decorated for judging between Mrs. Skiba’s and Ms. Hoaglund’s classes. Others were not so successful in getting their pieces to stay together.
“Ours got hit by a tornado,” said one team member as the pieces laid in a crumpled pile of icing-covered gingerbread pieces.
The two teachers swapped classrooms to judge the finished - or wrecked - creations with prizes promised to the best in each class. And, of course, students could choose to take a bite out of the classwork.
Skiba said this was a fun way to introduce the concept of scale and proportions for her students. “It brings those concepts into more real-world applications,” she said. “We had several groups of students who were successful in building their projects. It was also a good project for them to learn to work together and do some team building.”