Crazy in the Kitchen -  bringing reading, math, and cooking together to produce ice cream!

Age Range:  appropriate for most ages though parental help is necessary for the really little ones

Books Promoted:  Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic and various cookbooks on display

Per Child Cost:  $0.50 approximately

Ice Cream In a Bag Recipe from Kaboose:  Ice Cream In a Bag

What you’ll need:

• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 cup milk or half & half
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 6 tablespoons rock salt
• 1 pint-size plastic food storage bag (e.g., Ziploc)
• 1 gallon-size plastic food storage bag
• Ice cubes

How to make it:

1. Fill the large bag half full of ice, and add the rock salt. Seal the bag.
2. Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the small bag, and seal it.
3. Place the small bag inside the large one, and seal it again carefully.
4. Shake until the mixture is ice cream, which takes about 5 minutes.
5. Wipe off the top of the small bag, then open it carefully. Enjoy!

Skills Promoted:  Literacy through the use of a recipe.  Mathematics when increasing the recipe yield and measurement of ingredients.  Motor skills (gross and fine) by manipulating and measuring ingredients.  Social through interactions with adults and peers.

Commentary

I must say, I really like the theme for summer reading this year:  Be Creative @ Your Library!  Simple, elegant, and open to so many possibilities.  This year’s theme is wonderful since I enjoy being creative and I’m a big fan of homegrown programs on the cheap.

So June 27th brought my first “Create!  Project Day” in the series of four spread out over the summer alternating performers.  “Crazy in the Kitchen” was a bit crazier than expected.  My library is not big so we generally do programs in our picture book area.  I have all these little racks that I can display single books on top of the picture book shelves with the covers facing out.  I cleared off the regular books and put out tons of colorful cookbooks.   If you get them excited about a topic and put the books in reach, most of them will get checked out.  I also can’t handle more than 10 kids making ice cream at a time especially in my tiny meeting room that will generally hold about 15 people comfortably.  I gave each kid a colored popsicle stick to “pay” for admission and to seperate them into mangeable groups.  If you arrived first, you got an earlier group.

I read Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic.  It’s one of my favorite books and enforces that you probably should not cook alone.  Hee, hee.  Duck pretty much wanders out to go get something for his perfect soup and his friends find a feather floating in the soup…  Cute book about cooking even though we weren’t making soup.

We made ice cream.  I spent about $27 to make ice cream with about 60 kids with half a bag of rock salt, half a bag of sugar, and plenty of plastic bags leftover.  I found a really neat recipe on Kaboose for exactly one scoop of vanilla ice cream in about five minutes without an ice cream maker.  Of course, there’s no way I’m mixing things individually so I have to mix everything in batches.  <– insert evil librarian laughter here –>  Not only did I read them a book, I made them do math!  I wrote up the recipe on a big piece of paper and asked them if they wanted to divide one scoop of ice cream or have their own scoop.  Duh.  Okay, but you’re working for it.  Not every child I get is old enough to do math, so I did little signs on popsicle sticks and asked for volunteers.  Two kids holding “1/2 cup milk” signs get partnered up to make one full cup.  So I have how many partners/cups of milk?  You get the idea.

Once the math is done, I get to haul the groups into the tiny meeting room.  Remember the colored popsicle sticks?  If you’re wondering, I applied Warcraft instance tagging theory and pulled the groups according to order in the rainbow.  ROY G. BIV is a great way of keeping things in order without having to actually number things.  Colors also seem less antagonizing than “take a number” in my opinion.

What do you do with about fifty waiting kids and their parents?  You trick them into decorating your library!  Be Creative @ Your Library!  I’ve been having difficulties getting children to bring in their art wok for display and I haven’t been good at remembering to tell kids.  Despite the huge sign advertising and the “Your Artwork HERE” signs hung up all over the place, only one bite.  So I pulled out a really simple drawn frame and asked kids to draw a picture.  Name and age on the back.  Leave the picture and happy librarian will turn her library into an art gallery.

So ice cream.  If you’re a public library, remind parents about possible allergies and such.  This recipe I found on Kaboose called for milk, sugar, and vanilla.  You pretty much mix the ingredients in a small ziploc bag which gets chilled in a big bag of ice.  I spent about $30 total to make ice cream for about 60 with plenty of leftover stuff for a part two if I can bring myself to do this again.   I had two other helpers and the odd parent or two helping out for each group of about ten.  Lots of fun, but it gets REALLY cold.  Be prepared to get wet.

Please learn from my mistakes!  Do’h moments included draining the ice bags and putting more ice.  Don’t forget to “refresh” rock salt when you refresh the ice in the bags unless you don’t want the ice cream to come together.  If you have a way of controlling things outside and it’s a nice day outside, take it outside!  I had a slightly soggy meeting room at the end of the program.  It’s cold and that’s not a joke.  If you have towels around, consider wrapping each bag of ice in one to save your fingers.  If you’re doing big batches of kids, mix everything up before hand.  Keep the pint ziploc bag mixtures in the refridgerator so that all you really have to do is hand each kid a bag of prepared ice and the little bag.  I should have done this and it has the added bonus of keeping the mixtures colder to begin to help cut down on icy shake time.

Overall, it was a good program.  The age range was anywhere from a few years old to teens in this program.  The kids seemed happy to be eating something they’ve made and I got done without a lot of chaos.  Thank goodness for a good staff!  I’m sure you can tweak things for older or younger crowds, but I tend to try for blanket programs that can be modified to make it “younger” or “older”.

Questions or comments?  Check out the disclaimer tab and my about tab.  Happy reading!