Once again, we started off camp by reading the story of the day. For The Snow Queen, I found a version already edited for children, and cut it down a bit further to make it a bit shorter and more concise. The kids enjoyed it! When we finished, I asked them if any parts of it sounded familiar. When they said no, I gave them a couple things to focus on: someone riding a reindeer to go rescue a character from an icy castle, and a character getting so frozen they turned blue, and were only warmed when their best friend gave them a hug and cried. It took a few minutes, but while I was getting supplies set out for our first activity, B7 suddenly shouted out, “Elsa!” He was really pleased with himself for puzzling it out.

We started out by melting the Snow Queen’s castle. I had mixed some baking soda with a bit of water - just enough to make it moldable - and pushed it into some small sandcastle molds. I froze them overnight, hoping at the very least to help them set, but also thought they might still be a tiny bit cold. I don’t think there was enough water in the mix for them to actually have frozen, but they still stayed in their castle shaped when I popped them out of the molds, so it was a success either way. I set them up in trays on the table. They were actually set up ready before we started the story at the beginning of camp, and I really enjoyed listening to the kids talk about what they thought it was made out of. They had settled on flour and salt, which I did not try to correct. I gave them a cup with a vinegar and water mixture along with some pipettes, and they had a bit of a shock when it started bubbling up! B7 made the connection to the reaction looking the same as what we had for potions class during Harry Potter camp. Even after they finished melting the castles, the girls were really enjoying pouring the watery mixture back and forth, and scooping up the baking soda that hadn’t dissolved - it has sort of a slimy texture which they enjoyed exploring.

We have found a youtube channel that we really like for drawing tutorials called the Art for Kids Hub. We discovered it during Dino Days, and really like the style of instruction, as well as seeing the kid’s drawing next to the grown-up’s! We used this resource again to learn to draw reindeer.

The previous day, I had put a squirt of paint in each cup of an ice cube tray, mixed it with water, stuck half a popsicle stick in for a handle, and stashed them in the freezer. I brought them out now, along with some big sheets of white paper, and they set to work exploring this new style of painting. It was fun to see their reactions to how the quality of the paint changed over time. B7 described it as being like a marker at first, where it would just scrape off the side of the ice block, but as time went on and the ice melted a bit, they started having fun mixing the colours and letting the watery parts run together.

Next, we make some snowflakes by folding up paper into wedges and cutting out shapes. I hadn’t practiced this one beforehand because I remembered it from my childhood, but I was a bit surprised at how difficult it was to do the cutting. G5 had to work really hard! I had also totally blanked on how to make it 6-pointed, but 4 pointed did the trick for today. B7 was loving testing out cut shapes and seeing how they looked when it all opened up. He started looking for faces in the forms he made.

Our final activitiy was making origami doves. Nice and simple! It was good that this camp day was pretty chill - in more ways than one! - because this happened to fall on the hottest day of our summer in California so far. Playing with ice and thinking of snow was exactly what we all needed in our day!