Sunday 24 October 2010

Water and Ice Play

As part of our 'water' theme we have made a variety of icy 'stuff'.  There's lots of sensory interest at all stages of the process of making ice, touching water, feeling the coldness, exploring the ice as it melts, crunching and licking ice cubes.  There's also fun stuff like pouring the water into the trays and banging the cubes out again -all part of it.


We started off with some basic ice cubes.  I put them in this silver mixing bowl which added extra visual stimulation from the reflections and made great noises when shaking the cubes around the bowl! (This bowl was bought with the intention of play rather than cooking.  It is well loved and used as a mirror and a hat on a regular basis).


We went to the local Bowling alley where they do really nasty slush puppy drinks and got one of each colour to try.  That went down like a lead balloon but we did try them!!  We talked a bit about colours at least...


Next we looked at turning water different colours with food colouring.  Both boys really enjoyed this.  We used the 'Go Talk' alongside to encourage colour identification.


Then we used the coloured water to make coloured ice cubes.  I didn't realise that I only had one ice cube tray so when it came to doing this activity with James, I had to improvise. I tried making some in a mini doughnut mould I have and luckily it worked really well.....


Unfortunately, Charlie had to go to his riding lesson with blue hands!

We've also got some alphabet ice trays so we made names and played with those.


The other thing which has gone down really well is water/ice balloons.  The whole process of making them was quite a lot of fun.  Charlie must have played with his water balloon for at least half an hour when we first made them and has gone back to playing with them again and again.


We froze some too and few days later took them out to play with.  We played with them, watched them melt gradually and one we melted quickly under the tap.




I don't think we are finished with ice yet.  The boys find it quite stimulating so I expect its something we will keep returning to.  I just found some pumpkin cake moulds so we might do some ice pumpkins next week with Halloween coming up.

No comments:

Post a Comment