How to Make Ice Cream in a Bag

Yes, making ice cream is educational!

Have you ever made ice cream in a bag? If you haven’t these instructions from Freebie Finding Mom have it all covered. My daughter did this recently in a summer camp and said it was easy and fun, though her hands did turn red during the shaking phase.

Make this activity educational by talking about what’s happening to the milk as it freezes, why the salt is added to the ice and how the shaking helps.

Check out this post from Scientific American for details on all the chemistry that happens in ice cream making. It even includes questions you can ask your kids to help the predict what’s going to happen and observe what’s going on. How cool is that?

[Photo: Freebie Finding Mom.]

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Activities to Celebrate Ice Cream Month

The other day I shared some crafts involving fall leaves, but there are a lot of fun leaf-related activities that don’t use real leaves, so I wanted to share some of those, too.

Like these watercolor leaves from The Artful Parent. These are so pretty and would be great to make a garland or decorate the table for Thanksgiving. You could experiment with different kinds of paper, combine watercolors and crayons, use an eyedropper to apply liquid watercolors — there are lots of different ways to play with this one!

Because I’m a knitter of course I love any project that involves yarn, so this fall leaf lacing craft from Our Kid Things is right up my alley. The multicolored yarn they used is a lot of fun, or stick with fall colors. Either way it’s a great fine motor skill activity!

Using leaf shapes to make other crafts is a great way to incorporate leaves into the classroom without having to use actual leaves. For little kids this sensory painting activity from Kids Craft Room would be a lot of fun (I think this would be fun for some older kids and adults, too, to be honest) and makes a fun and easy decoration.

Of course leaf activities don’t just have to be crafts. Check out this great leaf matching game from Made to be a Momma. These leaves are so cute and after you’ve prepped the game you can play it over and over with no prep. Use fewer sets for younger kids and the full set for older ones.

You can also use leaf shapes in all sorts of learning activities, like in this fall leaf number tower activity from Fun Learning for Kids. There are leaves with single numbers on them that kids can use to stack cubes on in one-to-one correspondence, as well as ones that show dots like dice so kids can add up the numbers to build their stacks.

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