Guardian Angel Craft

The feast day of the Guardian Angels is one that we should all celebrate because we all have a guardian angel.  It's a feast day that I always try to point out to my kindergarten religious ed students.  Typically I have them do this cute guardian angel craft that includes the guardian angel prayer.

It's a relatively simple craft to put together and with a little bit of advance planning a class of young children can assemble this craft in under ten minutes.  That's important when you're working on a tight time table in a classroom setting.

To do this craft you'll need: scissors, glue stick,  a piece of card stock with the Guardian Angel prayer printed across the top (I set my page to landscape for this craft.), a piece of construction paper folded in half, a sheet of colored construction paper, a 2 inch circle (I use manila paper so it looks skin toned) a small heart shaped cut out, and some yarn strands

If you will be doing this craft with a group of children I'd recommend using a circle punch for cutting the pieces that will be the angel's head, and a heart shaped punch for the hands.  If you don't have a circle punch you can use the cap from a juice bottle and just trace your circles using that and cut them out.

When cutting the yarn for the hair for a group, I suggest wrapping the yard around a box of colored pencils or some small thin package or piece of cardboard so you can cut many strands in one fell swoop.  You want your yarn strands to be about 6 inches long.

You'll also want to cut trapezoid body shapes out of construction paper, too.  

Once you have the prep work done and are ready to get the kids crafting you'll need to have them trace their hand on a folded piece of construction paper.  I like to use white or yellow construction paper for this step.  Once the hand shaped wings are cut out you're ready to glue them on to the card stock.  Next you'll place the body over the wings.  The heart shape gets added upside down to make praying hands. Then, add the head and glue on a few strands of yarn hair.   All that's left is drawing a face on your angel.

My angel is just standing below the prayer but some of my students are far more creative than me.  Just this past Sunday several of my students decided that they wanted their angels to be flying.  So go ahead and angle your angel so it looks like it's flying!  The important thing is to just have fun with it.

Celebrating the Feast of St. Therese

Today is a name day for Katie so it's the prefect excuse to celebrate with a yummy dessert.  I wanted something with roses but lack of proper prior planning left me with no fun "rose" dessert ideas that called for ingredients that I had on hand.  What to do what to do...

Well, this morning I decided to improvise when it came to dressing Katie.  She's outgrown most of her 12-18 months clothes so we're close to being fresh out of cute dresses with little flowers and roses.  Then I remembered that strawberries are part of the rose family so I broke out a dress that I figured we wouldn't be seeing until next spring that has little flowers and strawberries.  Score!

That still left me trying to come up with a dessert.  Then it hit me.  Why not rose colored biscotti!  It's yummy, everyone likes it and it's easy to make.

The pink rose biscotti was certainly a hit.  It was a delicious way to celebrate the feast day of one of my favorite saints and one of Katie's patrons.

Happy feast of St. Therese!

Celebrating the Sacred Heart with Cookie Cake

I've become a bit of a heart shaped bakeware junkie with the sole intention of having these different pans for celebrating various feast days.  It's a little sad, isn't it. Even more so when you consider that I'm not particularly fond of baking.  Actually, it's not the baking that I have the problem with so much as the cleaning up the mess that I dislike.  Anyway, this post isn't about that.  It's about how we celebrated the solemnity of the Sacred Heart on Friday.

Friday was a busy day for me.  I took Katie to Mass with me in the morning and then had to run and grab soft pretzels for Ellie's class so they could celebrate her summer birthday with her a month early.  So there was a bit of running around in the pouring rain.  Then I had an appointment with my chiropractor followed by me rushing home to take care of lunch for Katie.  I decided to make a heart shaped chocolate chip cookie cake that would be decorated with buttercream icing to look like the Sacred Heart.  Originally the plan was to have it made before the kids got home but that didn't work out since Ellie had a half day.  Then I got sidetracked with eating copious amounts of raw cookie dough and chocolate chip cookies for lunch.  Eventually I got around to making the buttercream icing.

I'm not sure why, but I have the hardest time making red icing.  It never comes out as dark as I'd like no matter how much red dye I add to the icing.  By the time I got done fighting with my mixer that I now realize has a motor issue, I was too tried, hungry and frustrated to do any kind of decorating that was even remotely impressive.  The kids didn't seem to mind.  They enjoyed eating it.

Celebrating Advent: St. Nicholas Day

I realize I'm a few days late in posting this, but I figured I'd share some pictures of the little things we did to celebrate St. Nicholas day.

Early last week I gathered up some scraps of red construction paper and made a bishop's miter for each of our chocolate Santas.  I then took gold pipe cleaners and fashioned them into croziers.  After a few minutes I had three chocolate St. Nicholases on my hands.  Another blogger mentioned that she used candy canes for a crozier.  I think I'll be stealing that idea for next year.  Anything that keeps me from having to dig through my craft supplies looking for pipe cleaners is a good thing.

On Wednesday night after Ellie's school Christmas concert, I realized after the kids went to bed that I forgot to tell them to leave their shoes out for St. Nicholas.  So I very clumsily quietly crept into their rooms to retrieve their shoes.  How I managed to not wake Ellie and our super light sleeper Katie is beyond me. I had the hardest time finding a pair of matching shoes in Ellie's closet and I thought I was toast when I had the genius idea to use the light up Mickey ears that she had gotten when we were in Disney World.  I was unaware that they were crazy strobe light mouse ears.  Aaah! Madeline, of course, was awake. When I snuck into her room she wanted to know what I was doing.  I did the mom thing and asked her why she wasn't sleeping and left the room with her school shoes.  Well played, Mom, well played.

So after I went through the shoe rounding up fiasco that felt like it took about an hour but was probably more like 90 seconds, I rounded up the bags of chocolate coins and Santas turned St. Nicholases and set them up next to the dog's bed.  I figured it made the most sense to put the shoes next to the fire place, but I don't think the dog appreciated that I put three pairs of shoes filled with chocolately goodness right next to him.  I have to give him props.  He's got a lot more self-control than some of the kids.  He may have looked longingly at the candy but he didn't even hazard to sniff it.

The kids were pretty excited when they woke up on St. Nicholas day to find shoes filled with candy.  I didn't have any time to snap pictures of the kids with the candy.  Katie made a beeline to her shoes as soon as she walked into the family room.  Ellie wanted to eat chocolate for breakfast, but I didn't think her teacher would appreciate a sugared up kid so I told her she'd have to wait until after school.  She decapitated her St. Nicholas as soon as she got home.  Isn't she darling?

After school Madeline read The Secret of St. Nicholasto her little sisters.  It's a nice story book with beautiful illustrations.  I think it made a great addition to our celebration of this generous saint.