Our World Adventure – Italy – Anyday Adventures

Week ten of our world adventure, wow! When we started it was to help ease the monotony of #isolife but to be honest it didn’t occur to me it would still be happening some two and a half months later.

In all honesty though it has been the best thing to help keep up sane. A little bit of thinking, planning and engaging the kids I think it good for all of us. Most days we’re spending an hour (or less) on our “learning”, and really I think that’s plenty for a 5 and 2yo. They are still so keen for their freedom with lego, barbies and free crafting… plus outside play.

Anyway, this week Missy Moo had requested to go to an “Ice cream” and after a little bit of internal debating I decided to take her to Italy.

But there was no way I was going to waste that activity for a Monday; gotta make her work for it… haha.

So on Monday, instead we played a pizza game! Using this free printable it was a pretty fun and basic math game. Involving a little bit of counting while we decorated our pizzas. While we played it was a good time to chat about some of the different Italian foods we knew of…

On Tuesday we talked about Leonardo Da Vinchi and the famous portrait of the Mona Lisa.

Firstly we watched these two videos

And then it was time to craft. This was a fun one!

This style of drawing we call “colouring out” but I don’t know if there’s an official term for it. But we use that term for anything where there’s a little bit of picture, and you have to add the rest. Missy Moo (5yo) tends to thoroughly enjoy these styles of drawings. A lot of freedom, with a little direction. You can get the printable here..

On Wednesday it was finally time to have a crack at making icecream… without an icecream maker.

First we attempted the ice cream in a bag method; which claimed to take about 5-8 minutes We spent about 30 minutes shaking that bag and although it got a tiny bit icy it was no way close to ice cream consistency. See more pics and videos in my stories. We gave up and switched to a container in the freezer, stirring it every half an hour or so. Finally after about 2.5 hours in the freezer it is close enough to call it ice cream. I literally cannot fathom how this could have been possible with 5 minutes of shaking Maybe with a much smaller quantity, but I followed the recipe as it was.

Here is the recipe we used. It was utterly delicious.

For more pics check out the original post on facebook here.

On Thursday we played with pasta, because how could we travel to Italy without talking about pasta? I know right.

We went pretty old school for this activity, something you probably did as a kid. We dyed pasta (cheap penne for 80c a packet) and made necklaces!

To dye it just pop a handful of pasta in a ziplock bag with 1/4 teaspoon of vinegar and a few drops of food colouring. Massage in the bag then let it dry for an hour or two.

Both girls (2yo and 5yo) really enjoyed this activity and had lots of fun.

Our leftover pasta we added to our tub of rainbow rice that is still going strong from back in Ireland week. So no waste. Hooray.

For our last day in Italy we took a trip down the canals of Venice. Embracing my new favourite show on Netflix, Superwings, we watched the Venice episode to give Missy Moo a general overview of how the city of Venice looks.

And of course, then we crafted!