All of us have been down with colds the last couple of weeks, so things have been quiet around the house. Short fuses, since the kids have not been sleeping well, and fights to ensure the medicine goes in, have basically left us no time to do other things. The vacation has started with a bang, but I must say, the going on 5yo, has been finding something or the other to do. He’s been at his legos, wanting to learn how to make his own orange juice and other little things that remind me everyday that he’s growing up.

Today has been relatively slow (maybe because I have my idly batter, and like every south indian household having made idly batter is the zen!) and calming so we decided to do something fun.

I have been toying with the idea of ice for a while now but was inspired by Pranita of http://www.merogandmom.com/ and her ice play with her son to do some ice and salt experiments.

The older fellow poured out some water into their old baby feeding cups for freezing. He was in the freezer every 5 minutes to check if it was done and ready. That itself was fun because he saw the various stages of freezing water, how the ice starts at the top first. As he was playing with the ice he broke one and his finger went into the water, he was so shocked he almost dropped the box. We also played with the bubbles that had formed under the ice. I managed to finally convince him to leave it till the morning.

This morning we had the prompt.

• 3 Ice Volcanoes – you can make as many as you want to
• Water colour paints
• Toothpicks – we used toothpicks to dab the paint
• Droppers – once we started with the salt, the dropper paint application was great
• A base – I used a white plate to catch all the colurs and melting water that we would get

This is not as messy an activity as some of the others we have done so go right ahead and try this out.

Place the ice blocks on the tray you are using and set up the colours on a palette with a toothpick for each colour. Since its summer here and we are at a hot 34 C / 94 F the ice didn’t need any help to start melting immediately. Start by putting colour on all three ice cubes, then ask your child to put salt on one of the ‘volcanoes’ and see the immediate melting of the ice forming crevices in the volcano slopes vs the smooth melting of the others.

As the elder one kept dropping paint the formation of the crevices became more obvious and he just loved it. It started looking like real volcanoes soon enough.

This kept the fellow occupied for over an hour which is tremendous time for him! Also because I was enthralled with all that was going on and couldn’t leave the table myself.

The 4 yo worked his fine motor skills, pressing and dropping, salt pouring and colour skills for this one, and nothing has looked prettier. Try it this summer.