Ice Day

Last week I got together some plans for a string of activities about ice.  It turned out today was a good day to embark on this venture since my kids were sick and stuck indoors.  So, we made a day of it -- an Ice Day.

The first thing we did was talk about how ice melts.  I gave the kids ice cubes and let them tell me about how they experienced them through their 5 senses (aka, what they looked like, smelled like, tasted like, etc).  I had prepared 3 "environments" for the ice cubes to hang out in: a swimming pool (bowl filled with water), a salt sandbox (bowl filled with salt), and an ice skating rink (small cookie sheet filled with water and frozen solid).  We made a chart to predict which environment the kids thought the ice cubes would last the longest in and which they would melt the quickest in.  They both predicted the ice would melt fastest in the "swimming pool" and last longest in the "ice skating rink," but neither knew what to think about the salt.  Then we put an ice cube in each environment and set the timer for 10 minutes, in which time we would come back to check on the progress of our ice cube friends.


I mostly took this idea from the Gryphon House website.  This site is wonderful!  I have only just begun to explore it, but I am, so far, very much in love with all their ideas.  If you check out the site, you'll see that I didn't follow the plan exactly, but made a few modifications based on what I had on hand and what I thought my kids could handle/would be interested in.


Anyway, while we were waiting for our ice to melt, we decided to take the idea a little further and test 3 more environments.  We wrapped up an ice cube each in saran wrap, aluminum foil and baby socks.  We made our chart and predictions again and left them on the counter to wait it out with the other ice cubes.

We needed something else to fill the time, so we went ahead with another activity that I got from the House of Baby Piranha blog. I thought it looked like a good idea to focus on some dexterity for the kiddos. Here's how I did it. The night before, I filled up my cupcake pan with water like an ice cube tray. I added some food coloring to all the cups and popped it into the freezer. When we were ready to do this activity I soaked the bottom of the cupcake pan in hot water and...voila: round, colored ice cubes. I brought out 2 mixing bowls and put all the colored, roundy ice cubes in one bowl. The object was for the boys to move the ice cubes from one bowl to the other using only metal tongs. It was great fun! We laughed and laughed. The color in the ice cubes just made it more interesting, but you could use plain water too. The boys enjoyed doing this so much they each wanted to take 3 or 4 turns. Anyway, it was easy to use up all the 10 minutes (and beyond) on this activity.

When we went back to check on our "environments," we found that our predictions had come true and we spent the next few minutes talking about that. It was pretty natural for the boys to grasp the ideas I was presenting them with. They even understood about the salt pretty quickly. But when we got to the aluminum foil, saran wrap and socks--they became a little more confused. The idea of an insulator was too abstract for them to grasp, I suppose. Anyway, I compared the insulator to a winter coat that the ice cube was wearing and tried to put the idea on a level the boys could connect with more personally. They kind of got it, but I was satisfied that they were at least thinking about it.

After our more cranial workout, we decided to spend some time on a physical workout.  On to ice skating! We moved all the furniture out of our dining room, donned our slipperiest socks and commenced with whirls, jumps, glides, spins, and even a few falls. I'm a big fan of make-believe and the boys are big fans of anything active, so this was a win-win for us.

Then it was on to something crafty: making structures out of sugar cubes--you know, like ice cubes. Sort of. Only yummier. My oldest made this awesome castle, and the youngest made a variety of "guys" that were really just a couple of sugar cubes stacked together. But hey, to each his own. They both ate at least 3 sugar cubes that I knew of and allowed, and about a million more that they pilfered.

Finally, we took our colored, roundy ice cubes and put 2 together, of different colors, in ziplock bags to see how the colors combine as they melt. Pretty classic stuff here; yellow and blue ice cubes melt to create green, red and blue melt to create purple, and so forth. The boys enjoyed coming back to look at the bags and squish the colors together as the day went on.

We were going to do a magic trick with ice and salt and string. But our sickie-selves made us tired and burn out quickly. So I'll save the magic for another day. It's always good to have something on hand :-)