Gingerbread Activities for Kids: Easy Ideas With Free Printables

The easiest gingerbread activities for kids use paper and a pencil: coloring pages, mazes, picture puzzles, and stickers. They need no baking, no sticky counters, and you can print them ahead of time and keep them for a quiet winter afternoon.

Gingerbread works well for kids ages 3 to 8 because the theme is familiar and cheerful, and it is not tied to one holiday. A gingerbread man fits a class party, a December week at home, or a rainy January day. Here are ideas you can use right away.

Coloring pages for quiet time

Coloring is the easiest place to start. The Gingerbread Bakery Animals Coloring Pages have baby animals rolling dough, decorating cookies, and holding candy canes, all with thick outlines for small hands.

• Cookie decorators. Ask your child to pick three colors for the icing before they start, and use only those.
• Menu pages. Color a few pages, then staple them together as a "bakery menu" and let your child take your order.
• Story time. Ask them to tell you what the animal is baking and who it is for.

Coloring

Gingerbread Bakery Animals Coloring Pages

20 Pages

Gingerbread coloring pages for kids: baby animals baking cookies, decorating gingerbread houses, and holding candy canes.

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Preschool Activity Sheets

Gingerbread Man Mazes for Kids: 20 Printable Mazes

25 Pages

20 printable mazes shaped like a gingerbread man, each with a different gingerbread friend at the entrance, plus answer keys.

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Gingerbread mazes

Mazes help with pencil control and planning ahead. The Gingerbread Man Mazes for Kids pack has 20 mazes shaped like a gingerbread man, with answer keys for parents and teachers.

• Younger kids can trace the path with a finger first, then draw it with a crayon.
• Older kids can try drawing from the end back to the start, which is often easier.
• Race a sibling or a friend on two copies of the same maze.

Picture sudoku for early logic

Sudoku does not need math. In a picture sudoku, each row, column, and box must have each picture exactly once. The Gingerbread Sudoku for Kids pack has 20 6x6 puzzles for ages 6 to 9, with gingerbread pictures to color and answer keys. Start with a puzzle that has many pictures already filled in, and ask your child to find the one picture that must go in an empty square.

Stickers and simple crafts

The Gingerbread Man Printable Stickers are two sheets of smiling gingerbread men with cocoa, candy, cookies, and little gingerbread houses. Print on sticker paper or plain paper and cut them out.

• Reward chart. Draw a simple chart and add a sticker each time your child finishes a chore or a reading time.
• Cards. Stick a gingerbread man on the front of a folded card and have your child write a short note inside.
• Gift tags. Cut out single stickers and use them on wrapped gifts or lunch bags.

Ideas for the classroom

A gingerbread theme gives a class a shared story to build around. Read a gingerbread story aloud, then let students choose a coloring page or a maze while you ask questions about what happened. Print a stack of puzzles for early finishers, and keep answer keys on your desk for quick checking.

• Make a class graph of which cookie decoration kids like best.
• Ask students to describe their gingerbread picture in two sentences.
• Let students swap mazes with a partner and solve each other's.

How to print and prepare

Print at 100% scale on US Letter paper. A4 works too. Try the free one-page sample from a pack first to check the size, and print only the pages you need, which saves ink. Slip pages into a clear sleeve to reuse them with a dry-erase marker.

Looking for more? See our free Christmas printables and coloring pages.