Ice Tunnels--Fun for a hot, hot day

 I found this fun activity over at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education and we thought we would give it a try, especially since the temp has been in the 90's for way too many days in a row.

All you need for this actvity is:

liquid watercolors

salt

medicine droppers

block of ice

 Add a heaping teaspoon of salt to some liquid watercolors.

I picked yellow--which didn't show up well, and red and blue.  If I do this again I think we would stick to just one color, probably red would work the best. By the time the kids were done mixing the colors they had all turned to "mud" color.

 The night before this experiment, I froze water in different plastic containers.

We popped them out into a big pan to catch all the melting water.

 Carefully drop the salt colorwaterpaint  onto the ice.

The salt begins to melt the ice in different patterns, and starts to make tunnels into the ice.

 It was real hard to photograph the neat patterns that were tunneled into the ice.

We also used this as a science lesson and learned how salt is able to melt ice and we learned why salt is put on icy roads in the winter time.

 Some of our ice had cracks in it.  This made very neat patterns of color!

 These channels of red in actually inside ice. 

Science  is fun...and it can keep you cool on a hot, hot day.