On a cold day in the afternoon the JKK class from RisingOaks Early Learning | St. Patrick went outside to make some ice cream from scratch! This was something that we had been talking about in our room for a couple weeks and the children were so excited to try making it for themselves, with many of them exclaiming “YAY” as Harper told them that they would be doing this activity. 

To begin we talked about what it takes to make ice cream. First we would need to dig holes in the snow that were big enough for our mixing bowls, then we had to sprinkle some salt in the holes so it could make the bowls even colder, and then finally we could start mixing all of our ingredients together. 

Now it came time to prepare everything and make the ice cream! Some of the children were given shovels to start digging the holes, this took a while as the snow was quite frozen, but the children were determined to do it! Once our holes were dug Harper sprinkled some salt into them before putting the bowls in. Some of the children were curious as to how salt could make the bowls colder, asking “what does the salt do?”, which began an interesting discussion about the scientific reaction between salt and ice/snow. We knew that salt could melt snow but we learned that it could also remove heat from things around the snow, therefore making it colder! 

Finally, it was time to combine all of our ingredients. We got together our whipping cream, cane sugar, milk, and vanilla extract. The children were given the opportunity to take turns measuring and pouring in all of our ingredients. While we were pouring in the vanilla extract, some of the children asked “can I smell it?”, Harper went around and let everyone who wanted to, take a smell test. We all decided that it did not smell very good, which made some of the children hesitant about the flavour of our frozen dessert. 

Now it was time to mix! The children took turns mixing everything together, which ended up taking us a lot longer than expected. Because of this, our ice cream did not end up looking very much like cream, it looked much more like ice cream soup. We all came to the conclusion that maybe we needed it to be colder for the ice cream to freeze faster, or maybe we needed to mix faster. But after everything some of us still took a taste test, and the consensus was that it was delicious!