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Ice Cream & Color Week

Last week was unusually busy -- out of the house three mornings in a row, followed by a visit from Grandma and Grandpa while my husband and I went to a wedding in North Dakota -- so we had a light week.


The week's theme was inspired by the picture above: an idea from the ABCJesusLovesMe curriculum to review colors using ice cream scoops. Both boys are solid on identifying colors, but since we own the book Mouse Paint (a favorite!), we often talk about which primary colors combine to make other colors. 

Book: Mouse Paint (by Ellen Stoll Walsh)
Science: mixing colored water, making homemade ice cream
Craft: coloring ice cream scoops
Letter review (for Owen): matching upper and lower case Aa and Bb

I had hoped/intended to have them scoop water into bowls themselves, add a little fine motor work in, but Silas was in the way and time was running out, so I just poured the different colors into different jars myself. It was all I could do to squeeze one last drop of red food coloring out of my very-old bottle, which was okay for making orange but not nearly strong enough to make a convincing purple. Making green was the most immediate and obvious change.

First the primary colors . . . 

  . . . and then all the colors!

I cut an ice cream cone out of brown construction paper and cut out the six ice cream scoops free-hand for all of us to color. Markers are a rare treat around here. :)

Levi likes to use markers to "make snow" (all the tiny dots).

I did a very nice blueberry swirl, which Owen then insisted on scribbling over.

One afternoon after nap, we tried the old "ice cream in a bag" trick, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it really works! Super easy: put 1/2 cup milk, splash vanilla, 2 tablespoons of sugar into one ziploc bag. Put ice (I used a whole tray of cubes for each bag) and salt (bigger granules work better, so I used kosher, just poured a bunch in) in another ziplog bag. Put the milk mixture bag (sealed) into the ice/salt bag, seal that too, and shake shake shake! It took about 8 minutes to get a good consistency; if they hadn't been impatient, I probably would've done another 2 or 3 minutes. I had to take over shaking both bags after about 4 minutes anyway. :)

Action shot. Shake shake shake! (Notice Levi staring at the clock.)

Still staring at the clock . . . 

Nice Silas photo-bomb here. Owen is getting tired of shaking.

The finished product: no longer liquid! It's brown because I only had sucanat, not white sugar. I think it would probably taste more "normal" with white sugar, but my kids don't know the difference. 



A long time ago, I made little capital-letter cards and corresponding lower-case clothespins, so I pulled just A and B out for Owen to review. As I mentioned last week, lower case letters are new to him, and squeezing a clothespin is a fairly new skill, too. 

Hard at work.

The clothespins are numbered on the reverse side, as you can see. Dual-purpose for a counting game. :)

I had a painting activity planned as well, to keep reinforcing color-combinations, but we didn't get to it. It's tucked away for the next low-key review week!

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