Sensational Learning with Penguin

As I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, about making gingerbread, we went on to decorate some of our cookies with icing the following day. And we made a little gingerbread house, too!

The house was a very simple one, just two rectangles leaning on each other (making a tent shape) and triangular end bits to (roughly) fit. To glue it together we used caramel (melted sugar), and Penguin wasn’t involved in that part of the process as the sugar gets dangerously hot. His job was to decorate everything!

Note: I’ve seen that some people use icing for putting their houses together, but that won’t make a very strong glue at all, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

This activity was a little bit messy, but great fun for both of us! Penguin loved making icing, exploring the texture of whipped egg white, adding icing sugar and stirring it in, and then applying it to the gingerbread. He also enjoyed using the icing pens we’d bought.

I love the fact that while this is a fun and meaningful activity as it is, it also involves many learning aspects of relevance to us, such as sensory exploration, fine motor skills (including pincer grasp), working on hand-strength (squeeeeezing!), visual discrimination, bilateral coordination, making choices, and some basic numeracy. We also attempted to do a little bit of writing with the icing pens, but that was too tricky to be enjoyable.

I think we’ll be using icing more from now on, as we had such a good time with this! Have you tried making a gingerbread house, too?