Rainbow Ice

Spring Activities for Kids ~ Rainbow Ice Sensory Play

We're back for the final post in our spring activities for kids series with Jaime of FSPDT.  Last week we shared our flower hop, a gross motor game to work on color recognition.  Other posts in the series include making color surprise playdough and painting with mud.  The theme for today is sensory play.  We've made colored ice many times before, and since it's spring and we have rainbows on the mind I made a big sensory bin full of rainbow ice!

How to Color Ice for Sensory Play

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Supplies:

• water
• ice cube trays (we have these and these)
• liquid watercolor paint or food coloring

Directions:  I love the perfect cube ice cube trays, because they are perfect for building with ice cubes.  I add the color first, because it spreads evenly throughout the water this way.  I prefer liquid watercolors, but food coloring works as well.  When my boys were younger I stuck with food coloring  to add color to ice since there was often a lot of ice tasting.  I used a good 20-30 drops of color to get deep colors.  I made one color at a time and stored each color in a separate ziploc bag until all six colors were frozen and ready for sensory play.

Peanut (35 months) spent most of the morning lifting up a block of ice and throwing it with force back into the bin.

He also built a few ice towers, mainly so he could knock them over.

JZ (6) asked to add some water to the rainbow ice bin once everyone was done playing.  

The boys noted the murky brown color that resulted in the combination of all the colors of the rainbow.

For more spring activities for kids follow me on Pinterest.

Be sure to pop over to FSPDT and see their rainbow clean mud recipe!

More ways to play with colored ice:

Kool Aid Ice ~ Ice Bowling ~ Glowing Ice