Summer Reading Fun: Should I Share My Ice Cream?

When we discovered Mo Willems' "Elephant and Piggie" books, it was love at first sight. My kids love to listen to me read them (it helps that I do voices for each character) and Erik is even getting to the point where he can read them himself. I decided we'd use one of our favorite of these stories as our inspiration for our ice cream themed play group. 

 We started off with a fun play dough ice cream shop, complete with chocolate play dough. I had all our regular play dough toys out, plus ice cream cones, scoops, and sprinkles (beads). The kids had a blast with this one!

 Next we made our own ice cream cones with a few simple supplies. Did you know that you can buy already cut tissue paper squares at the dollar store? Like these, except I got mine at Dollar Tree for $1.

 For our sensory play, we let the kids go crazy with some "melted ice cream", aka shaving cream. It's cheap, it smells yummy, and it's pretty easy to clean up. That's three thumbs up from me!

 Our gross motor game was this fun sharing game. I was actually surprised at how much the kids enjoyed it. It was so easy to set up and was a lot of fun.

 For our snack we had ice cream of course! I chose ice cream sandwiches due to the low cost and ease of serving/clean-up. I did seriously consider making home made ice cream, which would have been Amazing, but a lot more work.

To round out our ice cream week, I had several fun ice cream books on hand for the kids to look at. They were all great, but the first two here were the definite favorites. Click any of the books below to go take a closer look at them on Amazon.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.