Ice Cream Birthday Party

Part II -The Activities

On the weekend we celebrated my daughter’s sixth birthday with an ice cream themed party.  I created an ice cream stand imaginative play centre as one of the activities at the party.

We started out with a menu board, created from her chalk easel and a home made sign, complete with some of her ice cream drawings.

We made the ice cream out of cotton balls.  We had been saving all our empty ice cream containers for months.  Vanilla was the simplest, just an old ice cream container filled with regular cotton balls.  For the chocolate chip and smartie flavours we used markers to add dots to the cotton balls.

We made the chocolate and cherry flavours by dyeing the cotton balls with fabric dye.  I added about half a package of pink dye to boiled water in a mixing bowl, and added wet cotton balls, that had been rinsed in hot water.  The dye only took a few min. to set.  Then I rinsed the coloured cotton balls with cold water, until it ran clear.

I repeated the process with brown dye to make the pretend chocolate ice cream.  After they were rinsed I tried drying the brown ones in the clothes dryer in a garment bag, but they became a little misshapen, and did not fluff up again like I had hoped.  I decided to let them, and the others finish drying on newspaper over night.  When they were dry, I fluffed them up a bit more with my fingers.

After they were all dry, we put them into empty ice cream containers.

We also used red pom-poms for cherries, and some of the plastic fruit and cookies we had for ice cream sundae toppings.  We added plastic bowls, scoops, cups and straws for shakes, and real ice cream cones.I also used some plastic bottles we had from play food sets, and added some home made labels for chocolate, caramel, hot fudge, strawberry, and pineapple sauce.

We also had a checkout table, with our play cash register, and a brand new set of play money.

The ice cream stand was a real hit, and something my kids will play with long after the party.  The ice cream play centre was set up in the basement, since it looked like rain, but later in the party it had cleared up and we were able to head outside for some games.

The first game was an ice cream relay race.  We divided the kids into two teams, and gave them each a wooden ice cream cone, and two magnetized scoops of ice cream, from the “Melissa and Doug Ice Cream Parlour Set”  The magnets hold quite well, but were just wobbly enough to make it fun.

The kids had to race through a hula hoop, and around an ice cream cone box with their ice cream cones.  It was such a cute race.

Our second game was our version of ice cream cone bowling.  We used ice cream cone popper toys, to bowl over some ice cream cones.  I found it to be harder than it looked!

Our final activity was some ice cream themed crafts.  We set them up in the dinning room.  There were wooden ice cream sundae cut-outs to be coloured, glittered and bejeweled.  There was also foam sheets cut out in the shape of a popsicle.  The children could glue a popsicle stick on the back and add a face with googly eyes and markers.

It was a great party, and the kids seemed to really enjoy the games and activities.

Coming tomorrow, Part III -The Ice Cream Sundae Bar!

This post is linked to its so very Cheri, and Between U and Me and Tatertots and Jello