Monday, January 16, 2017

The Great Ice Cream Hop

For a few years now on every MLK day our family has been doing "The Great Ice Cream Hop." Why Martin Luther King Jr. Day? No reason. No idea. I guess because it feels like this day should have something more special to it, so this is how we decided to celebrate, and now you can too!


So heres what you do. Research some ice cream joints around your area. Choose one for each person playing. We have 6 in our family so we choose 6 places. It can be anywhere from McDonalds to a super fancy ice cream parlor, depending on your tastes and budget.


Write down each of your picks on a small piece of paper, then place them in a bowl and let each person draw one. Then grab a spoon for each person, get in the car and head out! 


Go to each place and whoever chose the paper for that joint gets to choose the flavor. If you have younger children some of these can get pretty...inventive. Everyone gets to share and taste the ice cream and decide what they think! 



Next, print out one my Ice Cream Hop score sheet for each person (You could do this before if you wanted to keep score as you are going). And rate your ice cream in 4 categories, taste, looks (how it looks before you each it), texture (creamy, gritty, etc), and flavor choice (if someone chose something crazy it may hurt their chances of winning), from one to five. Five being the best ever and one being not so good. 


Next print out the winners sheet. Add up everyones final score and decide which ice cream won!


Last, for those of you who love to torture your children, and turn fun things into learning activities like I do, print out this writing worksheet so your kids can write about what was their favorite, what wasn't and why they think their score sheet was the same or different from the winners score sheet. 


And there you have it! A fun activity for the whole family that will take a couple of hours and where everyone gets ice cream. Brilliant! 
What are you waiting for? Pick up the whole packet for free below, get started, and let me know how it goes!