Primary Classroom Shortcut

We HIGHLY recommend using empty cereal boxes, milk cartons, and other small cardboard as the structures for your buildings.  Then use a hot glue gun or royal icing to glue the graham crackers to the boxes for a gingerbread appearance.   For example, check out this Target store created by 2nd grade students.  There is a cardboard box as the base structure, and then students used colored royal icing to adhere the graham crackers.

Makerspace Challenges

For classes who want to make the construction a little more challenging, check out this Allrecipes.com video showing how to build graham cracker gingerbread houses.

Light up your community using Makey Makey

WEBLINK - Makey Makey Simple Circuits Challenge

Try adding paper circuits to your Gingerbread community 

WEBLINK - Holiday Paper Circuits

Or creating circuits with littleBits

WEBLINK - Gingerbread Hack: a littleBits invention

You could even use Squishy Circuits for Gingerbread people in your community. 

WEBLINK - Squishy Circuit People Instructions

A great coding challenge for your Gingerbread Community would be to create an Ozobot touring path. Challenge students to create a "walking tour" of the community using the Ozobots as the robot tour guide.

WEBLINK - Drawing with Ozobot

Another twist on the gingerbread community idea would be to create everything out of cardboard and use art skills to create the gingerbread appearance. 

WEBLINK - Tiny Cardboard Houses

For the High Schoolers, a REAL challenge would be to design and program an Arduino Musical Christmas Light Program

WEBLINK - Arduino Powered Musical Lights from Instructables

---

Or even make your community virtually using CoSpacesEDU or Scratch!