Since its the holiday season, and my nephew was over visiting again, we decided to make gingerbread men. Luckily the dough was already made (downside is we didn’t get to work on the skills/benefits listed in the cookie dough post) but we got to do everything else!
We worked on bilateral coordination and upper extremity/hand strengthening while we used our hands to make the dough into a round ball and then we used a rolling pin to roll it out flat.
There was some more bilateral coordination as well as precision when we used the cookie cutter to cut the shape and then peel the excess dough away from our cut out so we could put the cookie on the tray.
Once they were cooked we got to decorate them. We used icing and little candies which allowed us to work on pincer grasp, precision, and hand strengthening for squeezing out the icing. Although we only decorated a few like men and the rest were more abstract, it can also be used to work on body awareness by decorating eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, etc.
The best part of course was eating them when we were finished!
