banana blueberry | The Handmade Experiment

As you know, I’ve been trying to come up with some fun ways for the girls and I to enjoy our summer together without going crazy. This is the last week of school for Quinby and I am starting to feel the pressure of providing creative edutainment for my kiddos. Today, we got to try out my latest boredom buster idea – Popsicle Adventures!

What you’ll need

wooden popsicle sticks (you can get them at craft stores or grocery stores. I got ours at Fred Meyers)
ingredients for making your favorite kind of popsicle (I’ve got recipes for the ones we made below)
sharpie marker
imagination

I started off by thinking up a bunch of action words like run, jump, dance, and a bunch of object words like ball, rope, dolls. I then took my Sharpie marker and wrote the words onto my popsicle sticks near the end of each stick. This will be the part of the stick that goes inside of the popsicle.

Then the girls and I had a blast on Friday making up three batches of popsicles. We made Blue Annas, Strawberry Limeys, and Triple Berry Blast Offs. I used molds that were made for plastic sticks, but just put tin foil on the tops and carefully pierced the foil with the popsicle sticks, adventure word down.

This morning, I took the popsicles out of the freezer, popped each one out of its mold, and wrapped them singly in wax paper before storing them in labeled freezer bags back in the freezer. Once my molds were clean again I made Cherry Lemonade Pops, Choco Pops, and Creamy Dreamy Lemon Pops.

Between all the cooking, (we also made rosemary pizza dough and chocolate chip pumpkin bread), and the trampoline jumping, Pannonica decided she was bored and thus the adventure began!

Each girl got her own popsicle. Both chose Blue Annas. Upon completion of the yummy pops, each girl found she had a word. PZ had hula hoop and Quinby had walk.

Now we had to figure out a way to put the two words together. First the girls tried hula hooping while they walked. This didn’t work since neither girl can really hula hoop even standing still.

Then it was decided that the hula hoops themselves should walk and so they needed legs. The girls got right to it, folding up paper to make accordion legs, coloring shoes on the ends, and taping them to the hula hoops.

PZ took hers for a walk, while Quinby enjoyed watching her sort of dance in the breeze.

The whole adventure took a little over an hour and everyone had lots of fun. When we were done, both girls wanted to go on another “adventure”, but I had to set the limit of one per day. I have a feeling we’ll be doing this a lot this summer.

Here are the recipes I used to make our popsicles. Let me know if you come up with any good recipes or adventure words. I could use some help brainstorming over here!

Triple Berry Blast Off Pops (we made these in rocket molds)