President's Day Palooza!

45 minutes

Intended for 24 guests, grades K-2

Supplies

2 tubs of pretzel rods (about 170)
3 containers of vanilla frosting
1 glue stick
1 spoon
24 zip lock sandwich bags
24 paper plates
24 pieces of green construction paper
"Duck for President" by Doreen Cronin
"John, Paul, George and Ben" by Lane Smith

Program

Let's have some fun with this one!  But before the fun can be successful, we need to set it up right.  The craft for this program is building pretzel rod cabins.  Lincoln lived in a log cabin, but I can assure you it wasn't this tasty! 

To create a building base for your cabins, trace the paper plate on the green construction paper.  Cut out your circle, and glue the green paper onto the paper plate.  This helps to reinforce it a bit, and it also acts as "grass" to build upon. 

This next step is a little messy.  You need to spoon out about 1/4 of the frosting can into a zip lock sandwich bag.  With this, you're creating little pastry bag so the kids will be able to pipe out the icing later.  This takes a little time on your end, but it saves a lot of mess later. 

 

As for the program itself, start off with a story time reading both books.  They're silly but also informative!  And then just let the kids build their edible pretzel rod cabins.  The concept is the same as Lincoln Logs and using the frosting as a glue to hold the pieces together.  It's fun and delicious. 

 

 

 

I was pretty impressed by the architecture skills of these 4-7 year olds!