The gingerbread house became popular in Germany after the Brothers Grimm published their fariy tale collection which included “Hansel and Gretel” in the 19th century. Early German settlers brought this lebkuchenhaeusle – gingerbread house – tradition to the Americas.
Gingerbread houses never caught on in Britain as they did in North America, where some extraordinary examples can be found. But they do exist in other parts of Europe.
In December 2001, bakers in Torun, Poland, attempted to beat the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest-ever gingerbread house. It was made in Szczecin, Poland, with 4,000 loaves of brick-shaped gingerbread measuring 11 1/2 feet high. It took a week to create and used 6,000 eggs, a ton of flour, and 550 pounds of shortening. Alas, they lost to an American team!
The above information is from an article by By Barbara Rolek, About.com Guide. To read the entire article please click on the below link:
http://easteuropeanfood.about.com/od/crossculturaldesserts/a/gingerhistory.htm
I wanted to show your some great images but they may be under copyright so you will have to click on the below link to see them and read more.
And, speaking of building, your kids will love building their own houses from a set of our giant cardboard wall building blocks. Toddlers and young children love building block toys and the more they have the more creative they can design and build.
This family bought a bulk quantity of Rainbow blocks for their family and you can own a set also. Visit our website, All I Can Imagine and see more selections.
If you are a parent and have to leave your baby or young child in another persons care during the day you need to carefully choose a day care center. You want your child to be in a healthy and safe environment.
Plenty of stimulation and emotional support is important as your child will be in the facility you choose for several hours and you want him/her to feel safe and secure. Here are a few things to look for while you are touring a possible child care center.
Observe the other children, do they appear to be happy? Look around the facility; is it bright, clean and cheerful? Does it have well-maintained, safe equipment?
Are there adequate changing and hand washing areas and are they neat and clean? Decide if you would want to come here if you were a child.
Make sure there are a variety of open-ended toys and that they are all in good repair. Find out how often the kids building blocks and other toys are washed; I can’t emphasize this tip enough.
Ask the owner/manager to see the toys. You will want to ensure there are many jigsaw puzzles and/or 3d wooden puzzles for children of all ages. Another important toy that should be available is building block toys. Kids need building toys that are large enough to stack, make large towers and are safe to be knocked down.
Kids love to carry about or put in a wagon, large block toys and move them from one location to another and if the day care facility does not already have ImagiBRICKS in their facility it will be a good idea to introduce these blocks to them.
Let the owner of the day care center know that bulk quantities are available at discounted prices for our large toy blocks. These discounted prices are also offered to homes, libraries, play zones or any one needing larger quantity of blocks.
Before you leave the facility find out if there is sleeping space with individual beds, cots or mats and that they are clean. Maybe you could supply your own so you know it is freshly laundered.
If you believe your child/children will be comfortable and fit in with the other children you may have found a day care center where you can comfortably leave your child for a few hours.
All three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Jim Irwin agreed they could not see the Great Wall in China from the moon. But, over 41.8 million foreign visitors to China saw this great structure in 2004.
Tourism to the Great Wall increased because of President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and with this increase in tourism sections of the Wall were restored. The Chinese government recognized the Wall as a unifying symbol of their nation after the death of Mao Zedong.
The men who designed this wall once were kids themselves and I wonder if they had building block toys to play with. You may have a future engineer in your family right now. Someday he/she may design and build a new wonder of the world. Help his/her creativity bloom with cardboard building blocks. The set pictured has both construction cinder blocks and timber blocks. Schools can order bulk quantity building block toys.
Promoting open-ended play time for your children with building block toys will be one of the best ways to enhance their learning and increase their fine motor skills.
There is a legend, that a helpful dragon traced out the course of the Great Wall for the workforce and the builders subsequently followed the tracks of the dragon ( Jan, Michael. 2001. The Great Wall of China. New York, NY: Abberville Publishing Group) but more likely is the fact that it was probably men who were once children playing with blocks.
The Great Wall has often been compared to a dragon. In China, the dragon is a protective divinity and is synonymous with springtime and vital energy. The Chinese believed the earth was filled with dragons which gave shape to the mountains and formed the sinew of the land.
During the Ming dynasty, nearly one million soldiers were said to defend the Great Wall from “barbarians” and non-Chinese.
The manpower to build the Great Wall came from frontier guards, peasants, unemployed intellectuals, disgraced noblemen, and convicts. In fact, there existed a special penalty during the Qin and Han dynasties under which convicted criminals were made to work on the Wall.
Before the Ming dynasty, the wall was built with rammed earth, adobe, and stone. About 70% is made from rammed earth and adobe. Bricks were used after the Ming dynasty.
The Chinese invented the wheelbarrow and used it extensively in building the Great Wall.
A section of the Great Wall in the Gansu province may disappear in the next 20 years due to erosion.
The information for this article came from: http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/04/18_great-wall.html. See this website for more information and read their Reference section for the books where these facts came from.
Is your school providing large toy blocks for your children to play with? Every classroom should include plenty of blocks for their preschoolers and also provide a safe place for block play.
Giant cardboard wall building blocks are one of the best creative learning tools teachers can give their children. Ideally, there should be enough room for the structures children have built to remain standing so that the children are able to go back and continue building at a later time.
Provide children with a three-sided classroom area, appropriate for noisy activity, out of the way of other classroom traffic, and thirdly, big enough so the children’s structures can remain standing. Children will be proud of the structures that they create with their own imaginations and will love telling you about them.
Block play are one of the best open-ended toddler learning toys and offers limitless possibilities for children to create, learn spatial awareness, develop math skills and use their imaginations.
When the toy blocks structures do need to be taken down storing them on eye-level shelves or stacking them against a wall will help you provide space for other activities. Giant cardboard building blocks should be organized neatly so that children are invited to use them independently.
When you want quality built wall building blocks that will hold up for many years and are safe for children to stand on you will want to check out ImagiBRICKS by Smart Monkey Toys. Manufactured in Wisconsin from at least 50% recycled materials these crush-proof kids building block toys are available in bulk quantities for your school classrooms.
Besides an hour of unstructured play each day toddlers need at least one half hour each day of structured physical activity. Taking time off from your household chores will benefit both you and your toddler.
Playing with your child helps you to get to know one another and you can watch how your child is developing. Playing open-ended games and make up activities so that you will not have to discipline your child for a while and just have some fun together.
Plan to do several activities each day and to stretch each activity to 10 minutes or longer if your toddler’s attention span will allow. Play in a safe area away from furniture with sharp corners.
One idea you may have fun with is setting up an obstacle course. Use pillows to climb over, then a cardboard box to crawl through. Set up an object such as a foot stool to circle around and then you could dash through a doorway and slid into or jump onto an old mattress.
You could use crepe paper on the doorway to create a “finish line” that they have to break through if there are several kids and a race is in process.
Obstacle courses can also be set up with building block toys such as ImagiBRICKS giant toy blocks. These are crush-proof and come in three different sizes. Each sized block is a different color and they are lightweight so that young children can lift and carry them. Let them make their own obstacle course to run through.
For their unstructured playtime they will love building structures and knocking them down. These building block toys are coated with a drool-proof coating so they can easily be kept clean and sanitized.
Back in the 1950’s my dad built me some wooden shelves so I could play shopping. My playmates and I would often shop in our grocery store and to this day I like to go food shopping.
Creative play is an important learning tool for children and they need all the open-ended play time they can get. Setting up a grocery store that is not as permanent as the one I had in my basement can be built with ImagiBRICKS toy blocks. These giant cardboard building blocks can be purchased online and come in red, orange, purple, green and timber-look.
The kids in your neighborhood will help you collect empty cereal boxes, cans, pasta boxes, asprin boxes, diaper boxes, etc. Design your store with the toy blocks then place your products on your shelves.
Get together and price all your cans and boxes and make some carts out of old boxes. Kids will have a ball shopping in their very own store and this pretend game will help provide them opportunities to learn organizational skills, mathematical skills and important problem solving skills.
Children can take turns collecting the play money and giving change. After they have finished shopping each child can load his purchases in a wagon and go to her own “house”; which could also be built with the building block toys.
Every component of our block sets are made right here in America. They are produced in Wisconsin by Smart Monkey Toys, where there is a large paper industry.
Our warehouse is near the plant where the cardboard building blocks are produced. By keeping everything close, we are cutting down on the fuel needed to transport materials and providing much-needed jobs to American workers.
The paper industry in our country has been struggling with many companies buying their cardboard from China. China has to import their raw materials from the U.S. or Canada to make their cardboard. The lumber is transported from North American to China, made into cardboard and then transported back to North America. The cost of this inefficient process is lost jobs, and much greater use of valuable fuel.
Do not be fooled by imitations! When you want quality building block toys you want ImagiBRICKS by Smart Monkey Toys. Available online.
Are most of your kids toys becoming electronic? Least you forget, kids need quiet toys too. Open-ended educational toys are actually played with longer and offer many benefits to your child’s learning development.
Recommended by doctors and educators alike, one of the most beneficial toys you can give young children is cardboard building blocks. There are no “rules” and kids jump right in and begin creative play. At first, a younger child may just begin stacking his giant building block toys and he will love knocking them down and restacking them.
As your child is stacking and re-stacking he is gaining muscle strength and coordination and he will soon begin to build structures with his cardboard building block toys.
Pictured here is the 24 piece set of ImagiBRICKS and is available online.
Recommended for a single child – more blocks are needed if two or more children will be playing.
When you provide building block toys to preschoolers guided play activities will come easy as the children will build towers, houses, forts, corrals and more just by using their own imaginations.
Social development is one of the benefits preschoolers receive when supplied with a bulk quantity of cardboard building blocks. Larger sized cardboard blocks, along with medium and smaller sized blocks, are the perfect way to keep your children occupied and are fun for just one child, but playing with other children makes it more interesting.
Because young children love playing with toy blocks it is easy for parents and educators to encourage children to learn to share and cooperate with others. As children grow, they, along with their little friends will learn to work together to build various structures.
Parents and educators can observe social skills that need to be worked on and correct and lead in a fun environment without hurting children’s self-esteem.
Bulk quantities of blocks are available online from All I Can Imagine and are recommended when two or more children will be playing at one time.
Because kids love cardboard blocks, having blocks such as Little Reader Blocks can be a wonderful tool to use not only for English speaking children but also for teaching English as a second language (ESL). Teach nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives and prepositions.
Using these cardboard blocks in conjunction with phonemic awareness will enable your students to understand that each letter has it own unique sound and will help them understand the basic sounds of our language.
These children’s learning toys, when used to teach kids to read, will help open up an understanding of the basic sounds in groups of words and they will be able to apply letter-sound relations with greater ease as you make up games using their kids building blocks during lessons.
Little Reader Cardboard Building Blocks are 3”square and easy for young children to pick up and play with. With these building block toys you can incorporate many games into your lessons and make learning reading basic sight words more enjoyable for your kids.