Monday, March 4, 2013

Shamrock Cookies with Leprechaun Dust

Ready to bake some St. Patty's Day cookies and improve those fine motor & self help skills?

Mix up some plain sugar cookie dough, or buy a tube of sugar cookie dough from the store*.  If you make your own, add a couple of drops of green food coloring to the batter while it's still in a creamy state, before you add all the flour and it gets clumpy.


 What do you want?  "I want to make Shamrock Cookies."  Our speech-language pathologist had everything ready for us to use for communicating what we wanted to do at each step.
 Using an individual student's augmentative communication device to express wants.
A firm "tumbler" size plastic glass will work as well as a traditional rolling pin.

Nice bilateral hand use and good downward pressure to keep the mat from sliding around the table.
 Asking for and receiving the shamrock cookie cutter.
Let's make more.


Carefully remove the excess dough from around the cookie cutter, then pop out your shamrock and put it on the cookie sheet.
Time for the leprechaun dust.  The OT makes sure the top of the bottle is hard to open...always trying to improve grasp strength.
 Sprinkling the leprechaun dust on the unbaked cookies.  How's your aim?
Just about ready to go in the oven.

Our cookies ended up to be only about 1/8" thick, so they burned in the 350 F oven after only about 10 minutes.  Hope yours end up just a little brown around the edges and chewy in the middle.

*Update:  I'm having second thoughts about using dough with fresh eggs--my students don't always wash their hands very well and I sure don't want them to get sick from anything we use.  What do you think?

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