Activities for Days without School: DIY Ice Cream, Waterfalls, & Balloon Ping Pong

DIY Ice Cream - Our friends at Parents.com shared this great way to make ice cream:

What You'll Need:

• 1 quart-sized Ziploc bag
• 1 gallon-sized Ziploc bag
• 4 cups ice
• 6 Tbsp rock salt
• ½ cup half-and-half
• 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp white sugar

Steps to Take:

1. Add the ice and rock salt to the gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Shake to coat.
2. Combine half-and-half, sugar, extract and a pinch of salt in the quart-sized Ziploc bag. Seal it tight, getting all the air out.
3. Nestle the small bag of ice cream mixture into the large bag of ice, so that the ice surrounds it. Seal the large bag tightly.
4. Now shake, shake, shake it up! After about 5 minutes, your sweet treat will be ready to eat!

Why it works:

In this party trick, you'll make ice cream by surrounding the ingredients with a layer of even colder ice. How? Salt (slightly!) changes the boiling and freezing temperatures of water. When you add salt to ice cubes, it causes them to melt faster, but the resulting water is actually colder than regular ice. Eventually, that water will warm up, but as long as there are still a few ice cubes in the bag, you know the surrounding water is still colder than ice. As this extra-cold water circulates around the ice cream mixture, it coaxes it into a frozen state.

Keeping your hands clean and washed doesn’t only keep you safe, but keeps the people around you safe, too. According to the World Health Organization, properly washing your hands means washing as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" twice — 20 seconds or so. Here are other recommendations from the CDC regarding hand washing.

• Keep the kids busy and active inside with Balloon Ping Pong.
• Go back to one of your childhood favorites and make Can Stilts.

• Build a fantastic family fort.
• Check out the magic of our beautiful Washington waterfalls!