Icetastic experiments

The children have been exploring the ice that had formed during last week’s cold spell. One child noticed the ice that we found in our water trough looked very different to the ice that had formed on some of our plants and furniture. What a great excuse for an investigation! Could there possibly be different types of ice?

Now, we could have had an experiment to see if ice lollies, ice cream or sorbets were all different but we wanted a challenge; how many types of natural ice are there, and can we make any?

Well, we discovered there are actually 17 different types of ice but could we make any? Of course we could! Jack Frost helped us too, there was sheet ice in the garden and we also found a little bit of rime on the furniture and plants but we had wanted to make our own. We looked in our nature box and found flowers, twigs, leaves, seeds and nuts which we washed so they had a little coating of water and we popped them in the freezer. Everyday we went in and sprayed them with a little more water to see if we could make our own rime. We also put a thin layer of water in a tub to make our own sheet ice. We filled some pots with water to make water ice. Finally, we mixed salt and water to make sea ice which stayed a little bit soft even after 5 days in the freezer.

So, I bet you all want to know, what other types of ice there is that we did not make out of the 17? Pancake, dinner plate, blue, green, black, hoar, névé, chandelier, candle, hail, interstellar, cubic and hexagonal. Wow, so many types!

This activity had the children guessing, thinking, enquiring, exploring and doing in an outdoor environment. We all learned so much and had such a nICE time learning more about the wonders of nature.

We made our own spikey (rime) ice
This is still a bit runny, it hasn’t turned very hard.

[caption id="attachment_12887" align="alignnone" width="945"] It’s so smooth.

Toddlers Remember

Over the last couple of days the toddlers have been talking about the men and women who  worked hard to  give us a safe place to grow up in. We also talked about the animals who did great jobs. They made red play dough and printed with paint to make lovely poppies. We used purple paint to make poppies for the animals. On Monday the toddlers had a “ nearly 2 minute silence to think about special people”,