Noah's Ark Cookie Recipe

Yesterday I reviewed this fun and educational activity book for Kregel Publications.

Inside this book is a recipe to make your own Noah's Ark cookie so I opted to test it out.

Here are the ingredients and steps:

Here is my final result!

Recipe:

Mix together in a bowl:
2 cups of flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger

Melt together in a separate bowl:
8 tbl of butter
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 tbl dark molasses

Pour the melted combination into the dry ingredients bowl and mix.
Stir into a lump and then chill in the fridge.

Roll out the lump on a piece of baking paper.
Cut an ark shape.
Pull away the rest of the dough and lift the ark and paper on to a baking pan.
Bake for about 10 minutes at 325 degrees.
Let cool and then decorate with frosting, icing, candy...etc.

You will have enough dough to make more shapes.

I linked up this post to Lisa's Try a New Recipe Tuesday.

Blessings,
Noreen

Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

It's that time of week again where I'm linking up with RAnn at her Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival.

This time I am sharing the following posts:

Pentecost Dessert

Pentecost Lapbook & Activities

Jericho March

Thank you RAnn for hosting each week and giving Catholic bloggers a chance to meet and share posts!

Peace,

Noreen

Happy Mail

Recently, I won a giveaway from Natalie at Detail-Oriented Diva. 

 She hosted a Chevron Wall Art Giveaway earlier this month.  

She creates these amazing color combinations of chevron art with your family information.

Here is what she custom made for me:

(I'm thinking I may need a darker frame.)

Natalie is amazing to work with. 

Quick to give ideas and to respond to questions.

To her followers, she offers a free printable section with the cutest graphics.

If she isn't a graphic designer by trade, she should be.

She's fabulous!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you Natalie!!!!!!!

Blessings,

Noreen

Pentecost Lapbook & Activities

I found this site called Christian Preschool Printables that has a section 

on Fruit of the Spirit Games they offer for free!

I printed a couple of these pages out and used them in a circle activity.  Students took turns and selected a card and read the situation out loud such as,

"while you are in line for snack time, a student comes and cuts in front on you.

How do you show patience?"

Each scenario asks the student to practice a Fruit of the Spirit (i.e. love, gentleness, self-control).

Even though I have first graders, they were able to brainstorm and share ideas
 on how to respond as God would ask them to.

We then worked on our Pentecost Lapbook.

I found the Pentecost picture over at Agape Worldwide.

On the inside, I included a Subway art picture of the Fruits of the Spirit that I found at La Dolce Vita.  

Kacie has created a lovely assortment of them in different colors.  

She offers them for free on her blog!  Thank you Kacie!

 I also made a book of the Symbols of the Holy Spirit which I made off of my computer.  

Nothing fancy but it gets the point across. 

Here's a close up of Kacie's work.

I also made the list of the Gifts of the Spirit and wrote the name on the outside

with an explanation of the gift when you lift the flap.

Under the picture of the Holy Spirit sending his gifts to the apostles,

I included this prayer.

Here's a better view of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

On the back side, I used Monica's beautiful drawing of the Holy Spirit 

she offers for free at Little Jesus and Me blog.  

She is an amazingly talented artist that offers her readers 

printable coloring pages for faith formation.

Thank you Monica!

I also found this Pope Francis trading card at That Resource Site that I gave to my students.

I give it to them in a shape of a book mark and instruct them to use it as such.

My last activity to celebrate Pentecost was an interactive discussion of how the 

symbols represented a Gift of the Holy Spirit.

I found it over at Lacy's Catholic Icing blog and realized it's geared towards 

older students but I thought my first graders would understand it well enough.

Thank you Lacy for the idea and the directions!

This was my last class for the school year.

I will miss my students!!

I sent them home with their Pentecost lapbooks, symbols of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit with the instructions, and the Pentecost cupcake.

I have shared this post over at Monica's Catholic Bloggers Network.

Blessings,

Noreen

Pentecost Dessert

UPDATE:  Check out Jen's Pentecost Flaming Cupcakes at Enter Under My Roof.

Jen's are so creative, festive and fun!

I saw this amazing idea for a Pentecost cupcake over at Catholic Cuisine 

and thought I would give it a go.

I read somewhere that it was tricky trying to get the sprinkles to stick to the mini marshmallows 

so I first checked with a friend for advice.

She said to dab a bit of sugar water onto the cut sticky part of the marshmallow to help it stick.

I also pinched the end of the marshmallow to help give it the shape of a flame.

It worked out well!

I brought them to my first graders so scaled down the amount of flames.

Didn't want to send them home on a major sugar high!

I also found another way to make the flames from melted hard candy.

They recommended butterscotch and cinnamon red hots.

Since it was for my class, I opted for a less strong flavor of Life Savers.

I only used the yellow, orange and red flavors and crushed them with my rolling pin.

Had to smack it a bit as if I was using a hammer.

I sprayed a non stick spray on my tin foil first then placed the crushed candy on top.

Placed it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 5-6 minutes until it was completely melted.

It looked like this when it was done.

I broke it up into smaller pieces and placed on my cupcake like this:

I brought a mixed platter of Pentecost flame cupcakes.

Due to the fact that I used so many different flavors in the melted candy, it had a yucky after taste.

I warned my students, but they didn't mind it at all.

It was a fun treat to teach about Pentecost!

I've shared this post at Monica's Catholic Bloggers Network and Lisa's Try a New Recipe Tuesday.

Blessings,

Noreen

Pentecost Lesson Part 1

I've jumped ahead again in the liturgical calendar for my class since 

I won't have them during the actual feast days.  

I have one more class this coming Sunday and then our classes are finished.
I'm going to miss my sweet class!

We didn't get the chance to fully learn about Pentecost so we'll celebrate

 our church's birthday next week too. 

This is what we've done so far.

After our book work, we viewed a very silly yet informative DVD called 

The Bedbug Bible Gang Pentecost Party!

I found it through my inter library loan network system. 

It's an animated story of the very first Pentecost which includes the 

Fruits of the Spirit, and the story of Philip and the Ethiopian. 

 It's geared towards young children from 3-8 years, so
 it. is. silly. 

 I have a class of 6 & 7 year olds and they loved it. 

 Giggles and giggles and giggles.  

They sang the silly tunes but it worked.  

They were able to recall all the main points.

My inspiration for our craft came from Dawn's at By Sun and Candlelight and 

Jessica's from Showers of Roses Pentecost Windsock.  
Thank you Dawn and Jessica!!

It took my students longer than I thought it would to create it.

It was a bit challenging for them in assembling it but it turned out very well 
since they helped each other.

Each flame listed a Fruit of the Spirit.

Jessica offers a free printable of it HERE.

Note:  I had made one hard copy and then shrunk it to 72% on my printer.

Thank you Jessica!!

I prepped the majority of the project and made the mistake of having 
too many color choices of ribbon :)

My students ended up with a rainbow assortment of colors which turned out really cute.

Yet took too much time to select.

I was concerned I didn't have enough red so I brought all I had from home including streamers.

I found these cute free bookmarks at Bible Story Printables.

They have many other cute ideas to teach the Fruits of the Spirit.

 I hope to make these cupcakes for our last class. 
I found then over at Catholic Cuisine.

And I will be spending time looking through Pinterest Pentecost 
for inspiration for next week's class.

Blessings,

Noreen

Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

It's time to link up with RAnn at Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival, where we gather to share our posts from the week.  Thank you RAnn for bringing us together each week!

I am sharing:

Ascension of Jesus
Broken Wings Book Review
Prayers Needed

Please come and join us over at RAnn's!

Blessings,
Noreen

Ascension of Jesus Lesson

My Religious Education Class has two more sessions after today so I wanted to cover 

the most important celebrations in the church.  

Therefore, we jumped ahead on the liturgical calendar to learn about the Ascension of Jesus.  

This holy day of obligation is 40 days after Easter which falls on Thursday, May 9th 

but the church will celebrate it on Sunday, May 12th.

To enhance our bookwork, we made an Ascension of Jesus craft that I found at Ten Kids and a Dog

 and used a picture of Jesus ascending from Catholic Inspired.  

I didn't have enough staplers to use in my class otherwise we would have done it exactly 

as Jennifer demonstrates in her blog.  

But we did use her idea of a LED tea light and put it in the clouds, behind the picture of Jesus.  

It doesn't light up as great as when using a plastic bag, but it did alright.  

Thank you Joann and Jennifer!

Here is our sample:

 It was front and center on our prayer table but it does kind of blend in with the prayer cloth.

As our treat, I sent them home with this Heavenly Jello. I've seen it several places with different names but the recipe can be found at Anastasia's Palace.  

It doesn't indicate the size of the jello package but I needed to use two 8oz packages.  

It's more than enough but one 8 oz package wasn't enough. 

The blue and white are to represent the sky and clouds:

I found these cute Ascension of Jesus cupcake toppers over at Celebrations in the Catholic Home.

I had intended to attach them to the back of the jello cup but my students 

wanted to use them as a bookmark.

It's a very pretty bookmark!

Blessings,
Noreen

Divine Mercy Sunday

This was my first class since Easter so we made the changes to our prayer table.  

Our purple table cloth was replaced by white. 

We replaced our purple Lenten candle with a white one and added this pretty 

Paschal Candle printable from Celebrations in the Catholic Home.  

They offer it free on their blog.

We replaced the thorns with silk flowers and brought back our Alleluia.

It also happened to be Divine Mercy Sunday so we watched the 

EWTN DVD: The Divine Mercy Chaplet for Kids.  

It has a long and short version in both English and Spanish.  

Perfect for teaching children the history of this devotion and the special love Jesus 

gave to St. Faustina to share with us of his Divine Mercy.

Source

We made our Divine Mercy image found at Catholic Icing.  Lacy offers a free printable of Jesus with the radiant rays to color and attach onto a toilet paper tube.  

I didn't get a picture of the ones we made in class so I'm borrowing one of Lacy's.  

Thank you Lacy!

Catholic Icing

Through Lacy's blog, I learned of the Divine Mercy Chaplet craft that she offers for free at

Making Music Praying Twice.  On cardstock, I downloaded her pattern with prayers (scroll down on her page) and then created my own "Eternal Father" prayer to be recited on the Our Father beads.

We colored the prayers to make them pop.

 I also made some Divine Mercy cupcakes.

I had seen this idea online to make the inside blue and red.

I've done it before for the 4th of July cupcakes and they worked great too for Divine Mercy Sunday.

That Resource Site has a great selection of printable resources to celebrate this day.  

I downloaded the St. Faustina trading card for each of my students.

I've linked this post up at Training Happy Hearts and Home to 4 Kiddos.

May God's Divine Mercy be upon you,

Noreen

St. Patrick's Jello

I found this fun idea to make Shamrock shaped jello snacks on Pininterest and I pursued it at Mommy I'm Hungry!

    

Put the above three ingredients together, use this:

 and you will get this:

Here's a level view showing how the whipped cream rises to the top:

The recipe is simple:
Layered Jello Knox Blocks
from Group Recipes

4 envelopes Knox unflavored gelatin
3 pkgs (3oz) Lime Jello
3 Cups boiling water
1/2 pt whipping cream

In large heatproof bowl mix unflavored gelatin with Jello.
Add boiling water and stir until gelatin is completely dissolved -- about a minute or so.
Stir in whipping cream.
Pour into a 13x9 inch pan, cover and chill until firm, about four hours or overnight.
The cream will rise during chilling to form a top layer.
To serve, cut into squares or rectangles of desired cookie cutter shapes and size for finger food treats. Place each piece between cut wax paper, and keep chilled until serving.

This can be done with any flavor and cookie cutter.  It was a fun and good treat for kids and adults alike!

I've linked up with Try a New Recipe by Home to 4 Kiddos.  There are many recipe posts to check out.  Thank you Lisa for your link up party!  Another new one for me is In and Out of the Kitchen by Feeding Big and More.  Thank you Cynthia and Dawn!

Blessings,

Noreen