Ice & Salt Reactions - Halloween Theme

Spiders in Ice castles and a Salt Melting Experiment

 

Another Halloween themed play treat. This time Dimples had a play date with his good friend Miss K. I had prepared some Ice castles (using sand castle molds) with some spooky plastic spiders and flies frozen inside.  I set out the Ice castles, some salt to help melt the formations and some coloured water with a dropper each.

 

Dimples and Miss K went to work sprinkling salt over their Ice and trying to master the squirt droppers.  Its not working, they both exclaimed slowly adding more and more salt, but it was. The salt reacts with the ice and as the ice melts it speeds up the process, so as the salty water runs down the castle is causes cavities, rifts and small trails for the coloured water to flow through. 

 

It is a slow process but it looks really cool when the colours start running down the crevices. I think these two 3.5 year olds were just a little impatient and wanted to get to the spiders straight away. They stuck with it, adding different colours on top and watching it flow down the sides. Dimples the extremist tried to speed things up by dumping handfuls of salt on top.

 

It looked vibrant and some what spooky but it wasnt what he had in mind, so he tipped amore and more colour over the top.  Slowly he seen it start to melt down the sides and he seen some spider legs poke through.  Miss K successfully removed a fly and decided to taste the ice. Hmmmm yukky she said to the salt covered ice.

 

The two friends mastered how to use the droppers and the syringe squirts by observing me and each other, Miss K found it easier to do it one handed pushing with her thumb and Dimples mastered the skill using two hands to fill the entire tube then squirting it with his pointer finger. Both got the hang of it though. This intruquit technique helps develop the muscles in the hand needed for writting skills and develops hand/eye co-ordination.

They also got a lesson on colour mixing; as our yellow and red colours mixed together we got a nice bright Halloween Orange, and the yellow and blue = Green. The friends noticed that all of the colours pooled at the bottom of the tray into a black colour.

 

Happy Adventures :-)