Our Life-Size Gingerbread House
The kids are LOVING the life-size gingerbread that I build for our classroom. It really wasn't very hard to make but I didn't think to take pictures as I was working on it ... blogger fail:( Because there was a lot of interest in the house on Facebook, I figured I'd try to explain what I did.
For the past couple of years I have made some sort of box structure for our classroom. Here are pictures of my previous castles and big red barn:
In each case I used
Mr. McGroovy's plans and most importantly his
special box rivets. The box rivets cost less than $20 for a box. The rivets are reusable but I couldn't find my rivets from last year so I ordered more from Amazon Prime and got them in one day. Because there are only 2 seams, the house could probably be connected with tape but I know the rivets will stand up to 20 rambunctious pre-k students so I think they are well worth the cost.
Mr. McGroovy's box rivets
For my other projects I downloaded plans from Mr. McGroovy. For the gingerbread house I pretty much just winged it.
I got 2 large refrigerator boxes and 2 dishwasher boxes from a local appliance store that does its own deliveries. If you can find an appliance store like this it is easy to collect the boxes. I suggest you call around. The trick is to bring a utility knife with you and cut off the top and bottom of the box. It is then easy to fold the box and fit it in your car.
This is an illustration from McGroovy's website showing how to fold boxes to fit in car.
I brought the boxes to school and cut them open so I basically had large pieces of cardboard with 3 seams. I took the 2 large boxes and cut them like this (the 3 vertical lines are the box folds):
My boxes weren't exactly the same size but working with cardboard boxes is very forgiving (so are my little ones who don't care at all that the back of the house is a little narrower than the front:) I then stood the boxes up and connected the front shorter sides to the back shorter sides with a couple of rivets. This is what the house looked like after I put the 2 big boxes together:
corner brackets
I then added a door in the front and windows. The house is strengthened with corner brackets made from the corners of small boxes. If you look closely, you can see the brackets in the corners.
The roof was made with the 2 smaller boxes that I cut to the same size and riveted together. It would have been easier to use another big box but I didn't want to go back to the appliance store.
Before attaching the roof, the kids (and teachers) cut close to 100 paper plates in half and then cut out the centers to make the icing for the roof. I then hot glued the plates to the roof and put the roof on the house. The kids used the plate centers and other plates and cardboard to create LOTS of candy decorations. Most of them have been sprinkled with clear glitter when the paint was still wet so the house looks especially sugary and delicious. I have been attaching candy with a glue gun each day after school.
Paper plate icing on the roof. The hole in the roof is the little flap I cut and attached to the front of the house with a rivet.
lots of glittery candy - that little orange gummy worm might be my very favorite decoration :) The black dot is the rivet holding the corner bracket in place.
If you have any questions you can email me at
[email protected].