Play Dough Ice Cream Play

We’ve enjoyed some gorgeous weather here recently, & when the sun shines nothing quite beats an ice cream! 🙂 Minnie loves it, so I thought an ice cream stand (with the pretend variety) would make a perfect role play area for her.

We made up a batch of playdough, & once cooled we split it into four & added food colouring to create the different flavours. Minnie asked for strawberry, chocolate, & mint, & I added vanilla. For the chocolate ice cream we rolled the playdough in cocoa powder & kneaded it into the dough. For the vanilla ice cream we simply added vanilla essence & no food colouring.  We added mint essence to the green dough & strawberry to the pink coloured dough, & placed in four recycled shallow trays, perfect for mini ice cream containers.

To make the ice cream cones we used some recycled corrugated cardboard that I’d saved from a previous craft. 

We simply stuck the card triangles together to make our ice cream cones.

To make the ice cream toppings we used coloured beads, mini foil shapes in a shaker, & small sticks from our garden made great chocolate flakes!

Our Ice Cream Stand was ready to go! We set up a table outside with a gingham cloth, a few different sized scoops, napkins, a cash till, money & Minnie was ready to serve her hungry customers!

Exploring size & shape with the different scoops

 

Minnie discovered the scoops made great patterns in the playdough  too

Adding a few sprinkles & a pea!

Minnie had a little mix & added some glitter!!

Minnie added food bags to her play area so she could wrap the ice creams up before handing them out – genius!

Yummmm! Comparing size… which one to go for ?

You can never have enough ice cream! 😉

An umbrella just adds that finishing touch!

The ice cream stand has been great for encouraging sensory exploration, maths, imaginary play, language, creativity & colour recognition/mixing.
We’ve kept the ice cream stand up in the corner of our kitchen as a mini play area (which we can easily take outside too), & simply wrap the playdough in an airtight bag ready for play the next day.
Check out our easy peasy homemade strawberry ice cream –  a real summer treat! 🙂