These recipes and activities are from the 2019 Nebraska 4-H Kool Kravings Camp, presented in part by Raising Nebraska.

No Churn Banana Split Ice Cream

Hobo Dinners on the Grill with Hamburgers

  • Recipes can be found on various websites.
  • We allowed each camper to add his or her own vegetables. We offered carrots, onions, potatoes, and peppers. We stressed in the lesson that all of these things can be grown in Nebraska. Vegetarian options were vegetables only.
  • Campers were involved in selecting what they wanted in their foil packet, making their hamburger patties, and in chopping all vegetables. All grilling was done by Camp Staff.

Kool-Aid Tie-Dye Recipe

Recipe provided by the Hastings Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Hastings, Nebraska – Birthplace of Kool-Aid

1 Color per bottle – HINT: Use squeeze bottles from kitchen areas of stores. They will hold more dye and are less expensive.

  • 2/3 cup water – warm water in the bottles. Not boiling hot, but fairly warm out of the sink. 
  • 1 tablespoon vinegar
  • 2 packets Kool-Aid – We learned that bold colors (red, blue, purple) worked better then lighter colors (yellow, pinks). For the lighter colors, you can add a little bit of tradition shirt dye to help them show.  We also used the official Kool-Aid brand as it was invented in Nebraska.

Mix until the Kool-Aid is dissolved.

Shirt Prep:

Little hair rubber bands work great if you have children that can work them, otherwise any type of rubber bands will work. 

Dying the Shirt

Add dye to a dry shirt. Make sure to get in all the folds. It takes a lot of dye to get a pretty colored shirt.

After Dye:

Let the shirt soak out in the sun all afternoon. This helps the colors set in more. Put them on a clean surface and check periodically that a pool of dye isn’t gathering. We didn’t ring them out right away to allow color to seep in more.

Once they are pretty dry, we did a quick rinse and hung dry. I advised my parents to toss in the dryer alone once home and to wash it alone the first time. 

I also let my kids know that this would be a ‘laid back’ tie dye, so they weren’t expecting in your face color. They turned out pretty nicely. Hope yours does too