Rainbow Ice Art

(41 Months)

We love playing with ice.  I use our empty milk and almond milk cartons to make giant icebergs for the pool.  The kidabunks love watching it bob across the water, dunking it underwater and watching it float back to the top and excavating dinosaurs and sometimes Toy Story figurines.

Yesterday, we decided to make colored ice dinosaurs.  Using the primary colors -again with the hopes that they can discover secondary colors on their own- we added five drops of liquid food dye to each mould and filled the rest with water.

Today, we covered their table with white paper towels and let them experiment away.
"Ohhhh!  Dinosaurs!"
"Look, there's a stegosaurs for you!"
"Can I please have all the red ones?"
Then, they noticed that as the dinosaurs melted the paper towels changed colors.
"Are they crayons Mommy?"

Both kiddies liked playing with this.  It's a great work out for fine motor skills.  Ice is slippery.  Especially tiny ice shapes.

Wild One stayed until they were almost all melted, then he decided to play "soccer".  Little Miss asked for a new white towel to finish playing and then asked if she could do it again.

So... did we get a chance to learn about secondary colors?  Not this time, they were fascinated by the colored ice melting and staining the paper.  I had to keep forcing myself not to say, "look what happened to that blue spot when you put the red ice on it."

I have a batch of colored flowers in the freezer and I'll be making another batch of dinosaurs in a few minutes.  Tomorrow, we'll fill the water table with shaving cream and add the colored ice flowers.