Dreaming of Ice Cream

🔅 Recommended Daytime Activity

Thousands of years ago, ice cream was only for kings and queens; people would gather ice from the mountains and mix it with honey and fruits. Nancy Johnson invented the ice cream churn, which made ice cream a treat for everyone — from me and you to Team Umizoomi who sing a catchy song about how much they love ice cream!

Description

Let’s pretend to make our own ice cream shop and then, if we have the ingredients, let’s try making our own ice cream.

Materials 

☑ Paper

☑ Crayons

☑ Printable (optional)

Set Up 

Here’s how to explain this activity to your child:

• Team Umizoomi sings about all of the delicious shapes of ice cream. Do YOU love ice cream?

• Let’s pretend we’re opening our own ice cream shop. How many flavors will we offer? What are our shop’s special flavors?

• Let’s create a sign for our shop, listing all the flavors with pictures and words. What is our shop’s name?

• Can you help me pick a flavor? Let’s switch roles.

Extend the Learning

I dream, you dream, we all dream of ice cream! Print and play with our ice cream stacking game, get an easy recipe for making ice cream at home, and sing a sweet ice cream song along with Team Umizoomi.

Words to Use 

• Ice Cream – a creamy, frozen food made with milk/cream and sugar
  

• Shop – a store
  

• Flavor – what something tastes like
  

• Shake – to move up and down or side to side with fast, strong, jerky movements
  

• Ingredients – the foods that you put together to make a dish
  

Simplify

Create an ice cream cone out of paper. Talk about the kinds of ice cream you love the most.

Stretch

See if your child can come up with at least three silly ice cream flavors — pickle, potato, pine tree, etc. Make up a story together about an ice cream store that sells silly ice cream flavors.

Why?

Pretending helps kids develop language skills and grow into great storytellers.

Conversation Starter

Try asking these questions at lunchtime or dinnertime:

What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? Now, let’s imagine some crazy ice cream flavors: pickle ice cream … cheddar cheese ice cream? Which crazy ice cream would you want to try? 

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