Susan's Homeschool Blog

During the summer when I was listening to the audios for the Ultimate Homeschool Expo 2010, I heard a speaker mention that one of her favorite activities she did with her kids was to make an ice cream ant. Since I was teaching my kids about insects, I decided to give it a try.

I started by scooping out three vanilla ice cream scoops for the three parts of the body: head, thorax, and abdomen. The children stabbed in six pretzel sticks for legs, all coming out of the thorax, of course. Two more pretzels were poked into the head for antennae. (You had to almost hold on to the ice cream to jab those pretzels in!) I quickly poured a chocolate magic hardening shell on top, for the exoskeleton. I was originally going to use almond bark, which I’ve discovered, is great for making frozen chocolate bananas. But when I tried it, the chocolate ice cream ant looked like a giant had stepped on it! It was a mess. It was probably due to the boiling hot chocolate being poured on ice cream.

My husband said there was an easier way, and off he went to the grocery store. He found the magic shell stuff around the place where you find Hershey’s syrup. I wish I had memorized the name of the thing, but it has the word “magic” in it, and “hardens” was another key word. It might have been Smuckers.

Anyway, since there are six people in our family, we made two ants, and each person ate an ant segment. All my kids fought over the thorax, for some odd reason, maybe because they wanted to get more pretzels. It was a fun project. If you decide to do this project with your kids, just remember not to use almond bark, or you’ll get a big gooey mess. I’ve included a photo so that you can point and laugh.

Tags: Homeschooling, ice cream, insects, science

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 7:24 am and is filed under Homeschooling: Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.