Ice Cream Inventions

With the end of the school year quickly approaching, I needed a fun topic and I needed it fast. What better topic than ice cream? Everybody loves it and there are endless possibilities for fun classroom activities. When I announced that we would be talking about ice cream and having a sundae party at the end of the week, my lovelies were beyond excited. For the end of the school year to be so close (3 days and counting) my kids worked hard and created some of their best work. To start the unit we watched an "EyeWonder" Video on how ice cream is made. My lovlies were assigned to be reporters. This meant that they were responsible for writing down three interesting facts from the video. . .another sneaky trick that teachers use to get their kids to pay attention without fussing at them. :)

After watching the video, we shared our interesting facts with each other. The kids really enjoyed sharing their facts and hearing what their classmates found interesting. I created a cute form for them to record their interesting ice cream facts.

The next part of the lesson provided practice on comparing and contrasting. My lovelies were given two sticky notes (a pink and a yellow). They then participated in a taste testing of two types of ice cream: Cookies and Cream & Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. As they tasted each flavor, the recorded descriptive words and their thoughts about each flavor on the sticky notes. They each filled out this cute compare and contrast sheet using their notes. It was incredible to see how serious they took the assignment. Food is truly the way to their hearts! :)

For the next portion of the lesson, we read the book Ice Cream Larry by Daniel Pinkwater. The kids loved the story and the illustrations. My lovelies and I began to compare ourselves to the book's main character Larry. Their responses to this activity were equally impressive as their responses from the taste testing activity.

In the book, Larry is a polar bear who eats a lot of ice cream at an ice cream shop. This draws the attention of a businessman (I. Berg) who comes to see Larry. Larry and I. Berg have serveral meetings, but nobody knows what they are about. At the end of the story it is revealed that Larry helped I. Berg create a new line of ice cream called "Larry Bars." This book provided the perfect opening for our writing/art activity. I told my lovelies that they would each be creating their very own new ice cream flavor. They were told to write about the name, the flavors of the ice cream and how they would package it. After the writing process was completed, they made their new flavor ice cream with construction paper, crayons and markers. They had an absolute blast making their ice cream cones! I was blown away by how much thought they put into the creation of their new ice cream flavor. Some of my favorites included: Worm Pie (cake batter and gummy worms), Blueberry Blue (blueberry ice cream with blue berry cobbler bites), Strawberry Chocolate Skittles, and Cinnamon Cookie Dough.

♥ Ms. Lee