Welcome to week 1 of the summer camp, or as I like to call it… Super awesome Ice cream week! 
Week one focuses on: 
Shapes: Circle, triangle
Colours: Brown, green, pink (Think neopolitan)
Sensory play: icecream sensory box (She has a great recipe and ideas for play dough too)
“Field trip”‘: An Ice-cream shop
Shopping list for week 1: muffin/cupcake mix, frosting, bananas, honey, peanut butter, cones, sprinkles, popsicle sticksballoons, card stock, paint, salad spinner/ marbles, glitter glue.
Outline of the week: 
  • Monday: bake muffins or cupcakes in cones
We kicked off the week by reading “Ice-cream cones for sale” by Elaine Greenstein. (This book seems to be largely unavailable to buy. There’s a long list of other ice-cream related options though!)
It was wonderful, a little whodunit explaining the history of the ice-cream cone. My 5 year old was all over it, he made predictions, he guessed, he couldn’t get enough!
Since I had them all psyched up, we decided to do some baking. I prepared an easy to read recipe with pictures, seeing as my oldest is just starting to read. We made carrot and pineapple muffins and iced them with green cream cheese frosting.
And sprinkles, lots and lots of sprinkles!
Useful tip: do not overfill the cones, ours looked a little wonky, but they tasted great! The rest of the day was a lot of fun, we did some spray painting outside and then played with our playdough and sensory box.
  • Tuesday: children punch circles from paper, stick onto triangle cones ( you can use scrapbooking paper, sandpaper for cones)
We have a climber and slide that looks like a school bus, somehow the boys decided that it should partner with the sensory box and become an ice cream truck. That got me thinking and on Tuesday morning we painted butcher paper panels to decorate our truck.
Just in case you were all thinking that I am a supermom, with perfect children, we are totally not. My children were in a foul mood on Tuesday, they did the crafts, but were not enthusiastic. Our soccer game was interrupted by a huge thunderstorm, so we made it field trip night. The boys were thrilled! We have a local ice cream store where you can choose your ice-cream and then a very wide selection of toppings. It was great fun!
  • Wednesday: cut large circles from white card stock, put in a shallow tray, children use brown, green and pink paint, and roll marbles around in the tray with the paint.
Wednesday was a little better, we decorated our truck with the crafts and butcher paper panels, and had a lot of fun doing role play. I think my favourite part was hearing my 2.5yr old say “what will it be sir?” as he was serving his brother!
My original plan included marble painting, but I seemed to have lost mine (my guess is it was somewhere in my first year of motherhood! Lol) So we opted for salad spinner art instead. (We’ve done this with waterbeads too!)
Useful tip: your paint needs to be very thin! I turned the circles into cones, added some rice to mini balloons and taped the inflated balloons to the inside of the cones. Noisy but fun!
At lunch time I got a little creative and made an ice cream cone out of an omelette and made “scoops” from apples and cucumbers.
  • Thursday: make “ice-cream” from frozen bananas with peanut butter and honey.
  • Friday: Cut popsicle shapes from heavy card stock, children decorate with glitter glue and sprinkles, glue popsickle stick to the back
On Friday we read some more stories (I found quite a few at our local library!) and then made the frozen banana “ice-cream”(we ended up not doing much of anything other than going to the park on Thursday!)
My children couldn’t believe their luck, they were allowed to use (butter) knives! Judging by the silence at my table when they were eating the “ice-cream”, I would say this recipe will stick around as a family favourite!
After snack, we made our Popsicles with glitter glue, it was the first time that my boys ever buckled down and really got into the activity.
I really had fun this week, and my children did too! I wish you every success as you play together this week!

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