I is for Ice Cream!

Easter gave us the motivation we needed to resume tot school activities, despite being home on quarantine. So we are finally continuing along with our alphabet!

Keep scrolling to see what we did this week, or click one of the links below to revisit similar themes from Honey Pot and Little M&M's tot school days.

I is for Ice Cream - 2016

I is for Insects - 2015

Letter I - 2012

Letter I - Fine Motor

I drew an "I" roughly onto paper, and invited Sweet E to fill it in with stickers, just to familiarize her with the letter. She just loves The Cat in the Hat book right now; we read it about twelve times a day. 😂

So she was excited to play with these!

Pattern Matching

I have been saving her food pouch caps for a long time! She sometimes sorts them by color, but I was so glad to come up with another activity with them. First I drew several patterns of ice cream scoops. Then I drew her a template of an ice cream cone, with three empty circles on top. She had to copy the pattern!

  

This was a great challenge for her! While she knows her colors confidently, she doesn't quite know right from left. So the bottom row often threw her for a loop!

I had about eight different pattern cards for her to complete. And she did them all, even returning to them once more during the week.

Color-Matching File Folder Game

I've used this folder game for all three kids; it's so old! The printable comes from FileFolderFun.com. Sweet E enjoyed matching up the ice cream cones by color.

Felt Ice Cream Cone Math

I had done an addition game during our 2016 Ice Cream unit, with Honey Pot and Little M&M, but I wanted a simpler counting and number recognition game for Sweet E. So I cut more cones and scoops out with some leftover felt I had from other projects. Then I took a die from one of our games, with numbers up to twelve, and gave it to her to roll. She had to say which number was showing, and then add that many scoops of ice cream to a cone!

She impresses me with how much she knows!

I even had a couple red cherries to add to the top if she liked.

We played with this for a while.

And then kept building cones just for fun!

Marbled Painting

We've done marbled paintings before. I realized that if you do it right, it makes a beautiful swirl, reminiscent of swirled ice cream. So we gave it a try for this week's craft. First I filled a tray with dollar store shaving cream, and squirt some globs of paint on the top. Then I showed Sweet E how to swirl it around with a straw.

We did a few different colors. Big brother and sister also wanted to join, but kept their creations to cut out other shapes of their choosing.

After we swirled the paint to our liking, we pressed a sheet of white cardstock onto the top. We let it sit for a few minutes, then took a straight edge (we used a craft stick) to scrape off the shaving cream.

Here are everyone's finished products, sitting out to dry. A few hours later I cut ice cream scoops out of ours.

Sweet E helped me draw lines on some brown paper, and then glued the scoops onto the tops.

Then we hung them up on a door, and they looked super cute!

Look at that swirl!

   

Cherries - Alphabet Matching

Just a quick activity to review all the letters we've learned so far. I printed out some images from the internet, and put A-I on the cones. Then wrote A-I on some red circle stickers too. Sweet E needed to read the letter and place the cherry onto the matching ice cream!

Letter I Practice

I created this page for Sweet E to practice our letter of the week, by creating it in various forms. Tracing, writing, stamping and building.

She did fantastic! The writing we'll work on in the future... 😂

But she was excited to build it out of various materials.

And especially to use playdough!

Scissor Skills

I also printed those ice cream cones in a row for her to do some scissor practice!

This was quite a challenge for her, so she only cut a few at first. But she returned to it later in the day and finished them all! I was so happy to see her persevere!

Ice Cream Truck Lacing

I remembered this vehicle lacing kit I had picked up in the Target Dollar Spot many, many years ago. So I decided to pull out the ice cream truck for Sweet E to finish off our week. She did a terrific job!

Summer Units - Ice Cream!

It's summer vacation, and it is so wonderful to have both kids home every day again! This was our first year with one of the kiddos going to school full-time, and we sure missed her! We are going for an unbusy summer, full of lots of unstructured play and outside time. But we're squeezing in just about a half an hour each day to have some learning fun too. We kicked off our new routine with an ice cream theme, and here is how it went:

Monday - Math (and Music)

We started off with a fun I-Spy game from Gift of Curiosity. Both Little M&M and Honey Pot had fun counting up the ice cream cones while I prepared the main activity.

I began by cutting out four flavors of ice cream from felt. It looked so cute, I had to take a picture of it before I ruined it with my awful handwriting...

Here is the complete activity. Today's skill to practice was addition, which Honey Pot had learned a bit of in Kindergarten. I left this propped up against the window, and when the kids were done with their I-Spy, they got right to work!

First Honey Pot took her turn...

So proud of her work!

And then Little M&M gave it a whirl. During the school year he attended preschool part-time.

But he too is pretty great with Kindergarten math, and he was so pleased with himself!

He returned to this activity again and again throughout the day.

And so did Honey Pot. What a sweet, hands-on way to get in some learning!

Monday is also our music day, so this is also the day Honey Pot practices playing the piano!

Tuesday - Literacy and Library

Tuesday is our reading and writing day. Storytime begins next week at the library on this day, but we still went and picked out all the books about ice cream that we could find! As always, the Gail Gibbons book was very informative and a little above their comprehension level, so I paraphrased as we went along and we still learned quite a bit about the history of ice cream! The favorite of course was the Elephant and Piggie book, which Honey Pot read to us. I love these books by Mo Willems. Perfect beginner readers!

To get in some practice in pencil grip and tracing, we used these pages from KidSparkz.

After reading all of our ice cream books, it was time for Honey Pot to practice her writing. I printed a simple draw-and-write page from a website called Writing Templates, And then I asked Honey Pot to write about her favorite part of the Curious George book.

Super cute ice cream truck!

And Little M&M, our preschooler, practiced writing his name in his notebook!

Wednesday - Craft (and Computer)

We tried a puffy paint recipe today, using 1 part school glue and 1 part shaving cream. The kids and I had so much fun painting with it! We each chose an ice cream flavor, and shared the bowls of paint. We added green paint (food coloring would also work) to make mint chocolate chip, brown paint to make chocolate, and left one white for cookies-and-cream.

We were sure to glob it on thick so it would keep its texture! Then we added real sprinkles.

Here are the final works of art, before they dried:

And a couple close-ups so you could see how they dry nice and thick!

Looks good enough to eat!

On this day we also hop onto the computer or ipad to play a game or two. At school, computer lab was one of Honey Pot's favorite specials, so I wanted to let her continue that fun at home.

Thursday - Science or Sensory

Today we went into the kitchen to explore ice cream science! We followed the printable instructions from this blog, but used rock salt instead of regular. I had read that suggestion from multiple other sources. We mixed up the milk, vanilla extract and sugar in a quart-sized bag, and placed it inside a gallon-ziploc bag with ice and rock salt. Then we shook it up for several minutes!

After just a few minutes it started to get reeeally cold, so we placed a towel over it to continue shaking it.

Then, after just a few more minutes, we noticed the milk starting to solidify!

I carefully opened each bag, making sure not to let the rock salt touch the inside of our quart bag. And then I scooped the ice cream into three bowls (the recipe made 3 fair scoops). And it tasted perfect! It was regular vanilla, and we jazzed ours up with some chocolate syrup and sprinkles. We look forward to trying other variations of the recipe!

Kid-approved!

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