Giraffe Snack

In the book On Noah's Ark by Jan Brett, the author imagines Noah's granddaughter on the ark helping all of the animals settle down and live together for forty days and nights.  I think the story is very creative, and in true Jan Brett fashion, the illustrations are beautiful, but there is no reference to God at all in the book, and that is a bit odd (more than just a bit odd actually, how do you write a book about a Biblical story and not include God - is that what this country has come to? - everything has to be secular?  I hope not).  We still enjoyed the book for what it is.  Sometimes I welcome the opportunity to discuss problems in books that aren't laid out as problems, and this book gave us that opportunity.  Children often learn more from a book when they think there is something wrong with the story, so I wouldn't ignore this book due to the fact that God is not mentioned.  Books become what we want them to become, and they can teach lessons that are not always meant to be taught.

Anyway, I love giraffes and the animal was recently featured in the April 2011 issue of Your Big Backyard magazine.  We spent some time reading about giraffes and decided to try the giraffe snack in the magazine.  I thought our two giraffes would go along nicely with the book.  I made a few changes to the snack, but it is based on the idea from the magazine.

For our snack, I cut bread into these shapes:

I then covered the bread with peanut butter and added pretzel stick legs and horns.  The eye is a chocolate chip morsel (the magazine recipe calls for a raisin) and the spots on the giraffe are crispy rice cereal (the recipe calls for breaking a cracker into small pieces, but I thought this was easier and provided the same effect).

*This post was originally published on my Superheroes and Princesses blog.