My friend Andrea finds the coolest ideas/clothes/articles about kids and always so thoughtfully passes them my way. One day, if she chooses to be so, she is going to be the bees knees of all moms. On Wednesday afternoon, she sent me this link, and you’d better believe that 10 minutes after all three boys were in bed for a rare nap, I was neither folding laundry, doing dishes, preparing a healthy meal, nor cleaning the bathrooms that so needed my attention. Nope. I was making this. A gigantic ice cube with green and blue food coloring, filled with mini plastic dinosaurs, sea creatures, and farm animals.
I started with a large plastic container and filled it a third of the way with blue-colored water and sea creatures. My reasoning was this: I would let this layer freeze, then add a green layer with farm animals, let that freeze, and then add a clear layer with dinos. It had to do with some internal desire to teach about ecosystems or layers of the earth’s crust, mantle, core, etc. But I didn’t allow enough time for each layer to set. So it ended up kind of jumbled up together in a blueish-green animal ice cube. But the good news is, it still turned out fantastic and only took about 12 hours to freeze all the way through!
The timing of this project was impeccable. With Milo out of school for two days, I needed to find something a little more structured to occupy these guys. Plus, it was nearly 80 degrees out. Perfect ice/bathing suit weather.
Getting to work
The only rules were: 1. You may hit the ice or the tools with the wooden hammer, but please be careful of your brother’s fingers, and 2. Please do not drink the food-colored water, as it has yucky chemicals (right?).
Learning to use a chisel
Consulting each other about what to do next…
Decision made. Water:
And more water:
It was awesome. This activity occupied Milo and Oliver for a good hour, then they played and swam in the green water for another 30 minutes before quitting for a lunch break. Thanks, Andrea, for finding this, and Jennifer for the great idea!
Hope you guys have a great weekend. Ours got off to a rocky start when Andrew was up all night on Thursday with some kind of stomach thing… I may have dodged that bullet- we’ll have to wait and see. But in the meantime, we have Washington University’s Annual Thurteen Festival today! So, if a stomach virus doesn’t make us puke, the carnival rides surely will!
Thanks for sharing this idea! We did this today and posted our pictures on our blog. 🙂
I’m going to make room in my freezer so I do this activity at my daycare. What a great way to keep cool and explore science. 🙂
We are prepping for a huge snow storm in STL, but I can’t wait to try this over the summer 🙂
Ηummm êtes vous certain de ce que vous écrivez ?
What a great idea for summer! Thank you for sharing – can’t wait to try it out!
What a great idea! I’m definitely adding this to our summer to-do list. Thanks for sharing!
How fun! This would be great to do here in the Florida heat to keep my kids cool and let them get outside play time.
I adore this idea, I’ve scheduled it for sharing on my Facebook page with 2.2 Million fans this week! I hope it brings you a wonderful amount of traffic to your lovely site.
I did this for my son’s birthday party many, many years ago. I made two blocks of ice and had two teams and had the kids do a relay to see who could get to the prize frozen in the middle first. Each kid had something like ten hits with the wooden hammer and then passed it along to the next child.
High excitement. Easy game.
Thanks so much for this awesome share. We tried it and had lots of fun: https://nonstopshopmom.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/ice-age-play/