Ice is Nice!

There was a cold snap in our room today! It was all about ICE at centers, circle time and even snack. At our first circle time, we talked about the letter Ii and it's short and long sounds. We also talked about how it is a vowel, and how important vowels are for making words. When brainstorming some Ii words, ice was one of the first ideas! We already knew a few facts about ice, so we used those for our morning message. Then, off to our icy fun!

Here are some pictures of our snow painting (our snow was made in a sno cone machine). We used water colors to paint on a layer of snow spread on top of water color paper. The way the paint highlighted the ice crystals in brilliant colors was beautiful! We had watercolor paper under the snow in the hopes of getting a print of our works of snow art, but unfortunately the paper only picked up a pale hint of color once the snow melted. We had a great experience with the process, though, regardless of the final product!

 

The real work today happened over at the ice blocks! Each group worked on freeing a variety of toy animals and other objects from huge blocks of ice. Hammers, tongs, turkey basters, forks, spoons, hot water (red tint), cold water (blue tint) and salt were used to try and melt the ice and free the animals. With all those tools being used to chip away at the ice, safety glasses were required for all little scientists! We decided the hot water worked best, although the salt helped. Banging and basting were a lot of fun, although maybe a little slower. We even used a hair dryer to add a little extra heat to get that  walrus free!

 

After cleaning up all the mess from our ice explorations and excavations, we had another circle time to talk about what we learned. We also sang and acted out a fun snowman song Mrs. Horton taught us. Then we enjoyed a bit of ice at snacktime with some fruit juice snocones to go with our healthy snack. It was a frozen fun day!