Weather week: Snow and ice

Even though the weather was nice and warm, we had a fun time doing ice and snow.

Things we might learn about

• Snow and ice are both made of water
• Vocabulary such as freezing and melting
• Cold water is warmer than ice
• Ice melts faster on a hot day
• Salt helps ice melt faster, which is why we put it on roads in the winter

Activity ideas

Ice painting

I got this idea from Easy Peasy and Fun after googling for ice related activities, but there's lots of different versions out there.

The night before I mixed up an ice cube tray with water and different colours of food colouring. Some people use paints, but the advantage of food colouring is that little ones can try the ice cubes as they inevitably will want to! We popped little lollipop sticks in as handles as I have many but I've seen others use mega blocks which looks like it would work nicely, or you could just use a cocktail stick or something - anything so you can get a grip on the slippy ice.

The next day Rosie was excited to try the ice painting, and the ice cubes (she ended up with a very blue mouth!). We daubed them around a bit and painted a rainbow, noticing how they worked better once they had melted a little bit.

Then we got distracted for a time and when we came back to it the ice had just about melted so we had some fun trying to paint with the tiny bits that were left without them falling off the sticks.

Elsa's frozen hand

This is a genius idea from the excellent Happy Hooligans blog. You simply collect some 'treasures' - we used buttons, pipe cleaners, pom poms and some random jewels - and drop them in a latex glove. Then fill the glove with water and freeze it overnight.

The next day we headed outside with the hand in a plastic tray and a few excavation tools - a toy hammer, a medicine syringe and pipette for squirting water and a bowl of cold water. We also took some salt to see what effect that would have. Rosie had a great time trying to get the treasures out of the ice. We discussed how cold water is warmer than ice and once we'd done that we added some warmer water to our arsenal. She also enjoyed putting the hand into her paddling pool to see it float and then fishing it out again with a fishing net.

This was a real winner and Rosie wants to do it again one day!

Music of the day

My other half provided some music to match the day! Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice of course, so we had a little dance to that.

Frozen yoga

Again we looked to Cosmic Kids Yoga for a little movement and we followed along to their Frozen: A Cosmic Kids Adventure:

Bedtime reading

Pip and Posy by Axel Scheffler is Rosie's absolute favourite series of books and we read the handily themed The Snowy Day.