Maker’s Monday this week was the perfect blend! Multiplication and division fact families, easy to assemble art work, and a quick holiday bulletin board made for a great morning. Normally Monday mornings bring in kids bummed that the weekend is over, but ever since instituting Maker’s Monday, kids come bouncing in and immediately read the SmartBoard in order to find out what they will be making for morning work. They nearly cheered when they saw that it was holiday related. I think they might be a little excited for Christmas vacation. 
The gingerbread fact family activity went smoother than I imagined it would. When you are at home creating things for your class, you never know how things will go. Sometimes things that you found simple are much trickier with 7, 8, and 9 year olds. I pre-cut the windows on the houses with a craft knife prior to passing them out. I just stacked similar houses together and cut the windows to 4-5 of them at at time. Doing it this way took about 3 minutes and save a lot of headaches. 
I passed out the houses before the kids arrived and when they sat down, they were able to get right to work. The pages tell them (on the top) which one to color, and which one not to color. My students loved coloring in the different houses. Once they finished, they quickly glued the two pages on top of each other. Then they opened the windows and wrote out their multiplication and division facts. This was a great tie in to our math lessons this week because we were working on the commutative property.
As they finished, they cut out their houses and I stapled them to the bulletin board. It was the bulletin board that we had hung our Multiplication Turkeys on, so I just pulled them down and stapled up the gingerbread houses! It was the fastest bulletin board change-over ever…and that is a great thing!
After I posted this product, I received several requests for an Addition/Subtraction Gingerbread House Fact Family Version as well. I listed this new product as well. Take a look in my TpT store for other fun holiday activities and resources!
