If you’re looking for fun and simple ways to bring holiday excitement into your early years classroom, these gingerbread centers for preschool are the perfect December choice. With 21 hands on activities covering fine motor, literacy, and math skills, students can work independently during morning tubs, small groups, or center rotations while practicing skills they need all year long.
This blog post will walk you through how to prepare your gingerbread centers, which materials you’ll want on hand, how to introduce each activity, and practical ways to use these centers throughout the month.
Preparing Your Gingerbread Centers
Begin by printing and laminating the activity cards so they stay durable through frequent handling. Using task boxes, small tubs, or zip lock bags helps children access materials easily and encourages independence during center time. This also keeps cleanup simple and reduces the need for teacher support.
Tip: Add festive manipulatives like pom poms or themed counters to boost engagement.
Materials You’ll Need
Having a few simple tools ready makes prepping these gingerbread centers quick and stress free. Gather:
• Pom poms, gems, or mini counters
• Clothespins
• Play dough
• Dry erase markers
• Laminating pouches
• Zip lock bags or task boxes
• Small tins or cups for manipulatives
Tip: Prep these materials once, then reuse them across all 21 activities to save time.
Gingerbread Fine Motor Centers
These gingerbread fine motor centers give young learners playful ways to strengthen hand muscles and build the control they need for writing. The play dough mats invite children to roll, pinch, and shape dough as they decorate gingerbread houses and cookies, encouraging creativity while developing finger strength. The pre writing tracing strips offer practice with curved, straight, and zigzag lines, helping children develop the pencil control needed for forming letters. Students will also enjoy the loose parts decorating mats, where they place buttons, counters, or small manipulatives onto the gingerbread figures. This open ended task supports hand–eye coordination, precision, and spatial awareness as children decide where to place each piece. Together, these activities offer meaningful fine motor practice in a cheerful, holiday themed way.
Tip: Keep a small tray of reusable manipulatives—buttons, gems, mini erasers—near this center to encourage repeated, creative decorating.
Gingerbread Literacy Centers
The literacy centers in this packet give children engaging ways to practice early reading skills through hands on exploration. Students can build handwriting fluency with the uppercase and lowercase tracing strips, then reinforce alphabet knowledge by matching uppercase cookie letters with their lowercase gingerbread partners. The beginning sounds houses help students connect initial sounds to pictures as they place the correct item beside each gingerbread house. Learners also explore phonological awareness with syllable clip cards, counting and clipping the number of beats in a word, and they strengthen rhyme recognition by matching pictures on the gingerbread rhyming houses.
Early readers can build phonics skills with the CVC word building mats, using candy themed letter circles to form simple words. The sight word matching cards support high frequency word recognition as children pair a gingerbread boy with the matching gingerbread house. Each activity is designed to give preschool and kindergarten learners repeated hands on practice with foundational literacy skills, all within a playful gingerbread theme.
Tip: Store each literacy center in a labeled task box so students can choose activities independently and clean up easily.
Gingerbread Math Centers
These gingerbread math centers give children plenty of hands on opportunities to explore early number skills, sorting, and visual discrimination. Students can practice tracing numerals on the gingerbread number strips, using the ten frames to connect quantities with written numbers. The cookie shape sorting mats invite children to match a variety of gingerbread themed shapes to the correct trays, helping them notice attributes and strengthen classification skills.
Children also build visual reasoning as they complete shadow matching mats, decide which picture is different, and identify what doesn’t belong in a set. The cookie sorting activity encourages learners to separate cookies with and without icing, while the size sorting trays help them distinguish between small, medium, and large pictures. The festive AB pattern strips give students practice extending simple patterns, and the number sense cookie sheets allow them to match number representations to the correct pan.
The counting mats let children count out gingerbread cookies to match a numeral, and the four step sequencing cards guide them through the process of baking gingerbread, supporting logical thinking. These centers make math engaging, meaningful, and developmentally appropriate for preschool and kindergarten learners.
Tip: Rotate just a few math centers each week to keep activities fresh and exciting without overwhelming your students.
Skills Covered
These gingerbread centers support:
• Fine motor development
• Pre writing and handwriting readiness
• Letter recognition
• Beginning sounds
• Rhyming
• Syllable awareness
• CVC word decoding
• Sight word fluency
• Counting and number sense
• Sorting and classifying
• Pattern recognition
• Sequencing
• Visual discrimination
• Comparing
• Independent problem solving
Tip: Use this list to guide small group planning or document progress across December.
Center Management Tips
• Offer only a few activities at a time to help students stay focused.
• Model each center before placing it out for independent use.
• Color code tubs or labels so students return materials correctly.
• Store laminated pieces in zip lock bags inside a larger tub for quick rotation.
• Add a photo of the completed center on the container to support cleanup.
Tip: Simple routines help children work independently and keep your classroom running smoothly during the busy holiday season.
Free Gingerbread Activity
You can download a selection of FREE sample pages, click on the button below.
These gingerbread centers for preschool bring joy, structure, and meaningful learning to your December classroom. With 21 activities across fine motor, literacy, and math, your students will stay engaged, practicing key skills through playful, hands on experiences.
If you’re ready to use these gingerbread centers in your classroom, you can download the full packet in my store. Happy Teaching! 😊
Purchase the Gingerbread Preschool Centers
To purchase the complete 148-page Gingerbread Preschool Centers, click on either store link:
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