Easy Cinnamon Ornaments

The kids and I made these ornaments today - they are pretty easy to make and the kids felt like they were making cookies -minus the sugar high. Clean-up is super fast if you roll them between sheets of waxed paper. And your house will smell like cinnamon for hours after they're done baking. (Heather B., this one is not for you!)

Cinnamon-Applesauce Ornaments

1 cup ground cinnamon (I use the Sam's Club containers - a good way to rotate your stock)

3/4 cup applesauce

1/2 teaspoon cloves

Combine ingredients to make a stiff dough. Roll out to 1/8" thick between 2 sheets of waxed paper. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters; re-roll scraps and repeat until dough is used up. Place on cookie sheets lined with parchment or waxed paper (or a Silpat, my favorite). Don't forget to make holes with a straw or skewer for hanging them.

Bake at 250 degrees for 2 hours, then turn off oven and leave cookie sheet in for 4-5 hours. Once cool, decorate with paint, glitter, or leave plain, and thread with a ribbon for hanging.

Moon Afternoon

One afternoon last week, inspired by a book we'd checked out from the library, I planned a "Moon Afternoon" with the kids. We read stories about the moon, made moon cookies, created full-moon window decorations, learned about the moon on the internet, and listened to one of our all-time favorite CDs, Catch the Moon by Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell. We all learned so much and had a fun time doing so! Here's what we used:

Catch the Moon book/CD by Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell

The Moon Might Be Milk by Lisa Shulman.

Goodnight, Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

The Going To Bed Book by Sandra Boynton

We also should have included one of our other favorites: When The Moon Is High by Alice Schertle.

For the project, we traced simple bat shapes on black construction paper and glued them to yellow-construction-paper moons that the kids had cut out. Not the craftiest of projects, but simple enough for Jake to do and they made good Halloween window decorations.

The "moon cookies" are my mom's Snickerdoodle recipe - yum!

Grandma Ann's Snickerdoodles:

Cream:

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup butter

1 1/2 cups sugar

Add:

2 eggs

2 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

Add:

2 3/4 cups flour

Roll into balls; roll balls in cinnamon sugar. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.

Some great websites for teaching kids all about the moon:

http://kids.nineplanets.org/moon.htm

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/time/moon/phases.html

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/index.html