Crunchy, Munchy Christmas Tree Cookies

For stART, a story and art link up at A Mommy's Adventures, today, we chose a story, that we've read several times this week - A Crunchy, Munchy Christmas Tree, by Karen Gray Ruelle.

If you're familiar with the story, you know that the perfect story stretching activity to go along with the book, would be to string popcorn, and cranberry garlands, and decorate a tree outside. But, we don't let the little ones under six have popcorn, per our pediatrician's advice, and since the two most anxious to do a project were both under six, it was back to sugar-cookies-as-art for us.

We started with plain dough, which I let the girls color green by mixing yellow, and blue food coloring (we also colored a small amount of the dough just yellow, for angel tree toppers). It was interesting to watch as the girls discovered, that different ratios of blue to yellow, would create different shades of green.

When they had the color the way they wanted it, they rolled out the dough, and

cut it into Christmas tree shapes, which they

topped with smaller angel shapes, and then

decorated with mini M&M's.

While the cookies baked, I cleaned up, and reset the table, so we could read the story again, while enjoying our own crunchy, munchy Christmas trees.

It's great to be a homeschooler.