Celebrate National Lollipop Day

July 13, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

I’m all for celebrating silly holidays any time of year, but I think it’s especially fun to note these days in the summer, even more so when they are food related.

For reasons I’m unsure of, July 20 is National Lollipop Day, so let’s celebrate with some sweet science and a few printables (not to mention some lollies to eat).

Want to make lollipops from scratch? Steam Powered Family has the recipe, just be aware you might need some special equipment like a lollipop mold and a good candy thermometer. Also be really careful with this one and little kids because hot sugar can burn.

Rock candy is sort of lollipop adjacent, though they take a few days to make while the crystals grow. Get the how to from Happiness is Homemade.

With or without a mold you can also make your own lollipops out of Jolly Ranchers or another hard sugary candy, which is a lot easier and faster to do with littles (and safer, too, because you can melt them in the oven). One Little Project has the lowdown on how to make these.

Whether you make them yourself or buy them, you can also do some experiments with lollipops. Make predictions and observe how lollipops dissolve with this experiment from Fantastic Fun and Learning, or paint with lollies with this idea from No Time for Flash Cards.

How about some lollipop themed crafts? I love this simple lollipop ornament project from Happy Hooligans. They’re so colorful and easy to make and would be great for your holiday tree, or use them in a pretend play sweet shop.

Or cut our a paper spiral and use it to decorate a paper lollipop, as in this one from 10 Minutes of Quality Time (the spiral printable is included). I also love the perler bead lollies from One Crazy Mom. You can make these a solid color or stripes, or use all those mixed up beads to make a totally random design.

Round out your day of lollipops with some printables. I found lollipop coloring pages at The Art Kit Blog and Twisty Noodle (that one’s a color by number) and dot coloring pages at Free Preschool Coloring Pages. You can also do a lollipop color matching activity with this cut and paste printable from Mama’s Reflections.

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Learning Activities with Snap Cubes

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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