coloured ice sculptures

Posted on February 14, 2013 by happyhooligans

building with coloured ice cubes in the snow

I’m really excited to share today’s activity with you! We were building coloured ice sculptures in the snow!

Now, we’ve played with coloured ice in the snow before, but THIS…

I’ve always wanted to do something like this with coloured ice, but I never quite knew how to get the cubes to stick together.

Then a friend in Ottawa shared photos of her boys participating in some Winterlude (winter festival) activities, and they were building some awesome structures with coloured blocks of ice. When I asked her how it was done, I learned that the secret ingredient is…. drum roll please… a bottle of water. I’ll explain in a moment.

First things first:

Gather up your ice cube trays and small food containers and storage containers. I have quite a few of them, and over the course of 2 days, I used them all several times, and made a ton of ice. I would fill up all of the trays and containers with coloured water, and I’d freeze them (some outside over night, and the rest split between the fridge-freezer and our chest freezer) and once frozen, I’d dump them all into a large bin in the chest freezer, and I’d start again. This is about half of my stash. I still have a few trays and a couple of ziplock bags full of cubes reserved for the next time we do this!

I coloured my ice with these Neon colours by McCormick, (you can click on the image below and order them from my site)

but you can use whatever you have on hand. GO EASY on the colour though! For my first round of ice, I put one drop in every ice cube compartment, but I didn’t like how dark the colours were. I kept them, and we used them, but for the next batches, I would mix up a jug of water with 5 or 6 drops of colour in it, and I’d pour that whole jug into a tray or two. Much better.

The perfect conditions:

Once you’ve got enough ice made, you just need to wait for a nice, COLD day! You want it to be BELOW zero (celcius) or below 32 Farnenheit for this to work.

The secret ingredient:

A bottle of water! I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before! Every time you add an ice cube to your structure, dribble a bit of water over the cubes, and have the children count to ten. The water freezes quite quickly upon contact with the ice, and while the children are counting, forms a glue to hold the cubes together!

Our temperature was hovering right around zero today, so some cubes took longer than 10 seconds to freeze into place. I think the colder it is, the quicker your water will freeze, and the more solid and sturdy your structure will be.

This was a great start for us today though. The colours are gorgeous, and the ice shapes look good enough to eat!

I’m hoping for the temps to dip a little more so we can get back out there and add to it!

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Polly Pocket Ice Skating Party

Posted on November 8, 2012 by happyhooligans

Temperatures are falling here, and we awoke today to find a layer of ice over the pond and our bird-bath frozen solid!

Score!! I carefully lifted ice out of the bird-bath and moved it to the deck so the Hooligans could examine it.

As I watched them sliding their fingers over the smooth surface of the ice, and idea came to mind, and I dashed inside to grab our Polly bucket.

An Ice Skating Party!

It started with just a few Pollys gliding around the ice, and soon became a full on party at the rink. They loaded up the ice with furniture and Polly pets.

Look at them all gathered around that little bit of ice! They played like that for almost 2 hours.

By the time we stopped for lunch, the girls had run off to play in the yard, and our little guy excitedly shouted at me to come and see what he had done.

With the ice to himself, he’d created a masterpiece!

There were some terrific outdoor play ideas linked up to the Outdoor Play Party last week. My favourite was Shapes on the Playground from Toddlers through Preschool!

I love the idea of having the children look for shapes in ordinary, everyday objects while you’re out and about. What a great way to learn through play!

How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Any kind of children’s outdoor play-related posts are welcome!

We’d appreciate it if you included a link back to this post (either in your post or sidebar) to help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play! In return, we’ll gladly further share your post on Facebook/ Twitter/ Pinterest. Please feel free to grab the Outdoor Play Party button from the sidebar and/or include a text link back.

Please note that by contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished if featured. (If you have been featured, please feel free to grab the ‘featured’ button from the sidebar.) Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us every other week!

coloured ice cubes

Posted on September 26, 2011 by happyhooligans

Playing with coloured ice cubes on a hot fall day:

We are in the midst of a Fall Heat-Wave here. It’s incredible! It’s hot! It’s sticky! And I’m loving it! It was 27 degrees here this afternoon!!! TWENTY-SEVEN DEGREES on the 26th of September! Unreal! What’s also kinda strange is that our leaves are just starting turn. Some years, we start seeing tinges of orange in late August, but this year, here we are, almost to October, and we’re just starting to see bits of colour here and there.

I’m not sure what it’s all about, but I’m not complaining. I am so not ready to bid farewell to our warm, sunny days. The longer winter stays at bay, the better, in my opinion.

Someone was complaining today though! This morning, while playing in the yard, Miss Mess asked if we could go INSIDE, because it was “too hot” to play outside!

Fortunately, on the weekend, I ran across this post at Mommy Savers, suggesting coloured ice cubes for bath-time fun. I didn’t realize today would be as hot as it was, and I didn’t have bath-fun in mind. I just thought the brilliantly candied-coloured cubes looked awesome, and figured the Hooligans would have fun playing with them in a big bowl of water. So I put Andrew to work, and had him whip up a couple of batches of them.

It was a fun little exercise in colour mixing for him. He’s done colour mixing dozens of times, but it never gets old.

I’m so glad I had these in the freezer this morning, because as soon as my little friend complained about the heat this morning, ta-daaa… Instant chill! And FUN? Oh my goodness! They LOVED it! We dumped the cubes into a big glass bowl of water, and added tongs, slotted spoons, and small containers. Our first tray of cubes melted fairly quickly, because the water wasn’t terribly cold. We dumped the second tray in, along with a tray of normal ice cubes. These cubes lasted much longer, because the water temp had dropped significantly after the addition of 3 trays of ice.

This probably occupied the Hooligans for about 40 minutes. When the cubes were gone, they were happy to play in the water with the containers and ice-trays.

What a cool and refreshing activity for a warm day! We will definitely do this again. It takes no time to mix up a couple of trays of these, and have them in the freezer for an easy but super-fun activity. I think they’d be awesome in the tub too! I wish I’d thought of this when my own boys were younger!

painting with coloured ice

Posted on September 12, 2011 by happyhooligans

Painting with coloured ice – a great summer art experience!

Check it out!! We painted with coloured ice today! I saw lots of posts about this over the the summer, and now I know why it was such a popular activity! You have to try it. It’s so awesome!

The ages of the kids here today ranged from 1 to 5, and they all loved doing this. The colours are vibrant, the “paint” slides across the page beautifully, and the results are really pretty! They look like watercolour paintings.

This is super-easy to prepare. I used what I’m assuming is an egg holder (or possibly an egg mold), to make my coloured ice, but you can use ice cube trays, paper cups, popsicle molds etc. You can even paint with real popsicles, but I’m thinking the sticky-factor might be a bit of a put-off, especially if you’re planning on keeping your little one’s art-work. Not to mention pricey (and wasteful).

Here’s what we did:

I found this egg mold at a thrift shop a couple of weeks ago. I believe it’s a jello mold. I wasn’t sure about that when I bought it. I just saw the holes in the op of it, and I knew exactly what I’d be using it for!I

I filled the container to the halfway point, and then added some food colouring (I used the gel kind for cake decorating, which made for beautifully vibrant ice-eggs), snapped the case shut, and finished filling the eggs through the hole on top. There was a bit of leaking, as the case didn’t shut quite right, but I secured the two halves together with the caps of a couple of pens (I know, Einstein or what?).

Then, I dropped the popsicle sticks through the holes, and placed the case in the freezer (and totally forgot about it until today).

I popped the whole thing into a bucket of warmish water for a couple of seconds so the ice-eggs would come out easily. I couldn’t belive THE COLOURS when I opened it up. Hello, my pretties!

One of the Hooligans’ Gramma’s brings us loads of thin white cardboard (a little thicker than Bristol Board) so that’s what we used as our canvases. You could paint on anything really, but I suspect regular paper would get a fairly soggy if your ice was melting quickly (which ours was today, as it was a super hot afternoon).

Isn’t it pretty? I was so excited! This was way better than I ever imagined it would be! The colours were gorgeous. My advice would be to quit while you’re ahead though, because some of the paintings became really wet with all the melting, and the colours kind of blurred together, which was pretty, but not quite as interesting as the lines and squiggles that were so clear at the beginning.

This actually used up very little of the ice-eggs, so I popped them all back in the case and put them back in the freezer. We’ll be able to do this several more times, before they run out. Ok, seriously? I can’t WAIT to do this again tomorrow!

Big hit! So easy, so beautiful! Give it a try, and let us know how it works out for you!Want to see some other nifty things we’ve done with ice? Check here, here and here!