Ice Painting Activity

It was so hot last week. If you knew me, you’d quickly realize I’m not a hot weather gal. At all. So I do what I can to stay cool. The kiddo, on the other hand, loves being outside no matter what the weather. So in an effort to keep him happy and outside (and me happy and cool), we’ve been doing lots of fun ice and water play. Here’s one of our ice painting activities… He really loved it!

One thing I realized when I decided to make the colored ice was that I don’t have ice trays. Ooops! We ditched them when we bought our fridge with the ice maker. But I did have a mini muffin tin, and that worked out perfectly.

I filled the sections with water, and then applied a drop or two of food coloring. Don’t add too much yellow food coloring, because you’ll end up with orange ice instead. We also combined a couple of food colors to make other colors while we talked about primary and secondary colors.

Blue and yellow make green. Red and blue make purple. You get the idea.

I waited too long to put the popsicle sticks in the ice cubes. I think waiting about 30 minutes to an hour would be best. I couldn’t even get them in most of the ice, but I managed a handful.

So he painted with the ice on sticks until they started to melt and fall off. Then he decided that it’s much more fun to paint with ice using your hands. Okay, it was pretty fun. And since it’s food coloring, it washed right off with no problems.

We made such a mess, but it was a fun mess.

What’s your favorite water or ice activity to stay cool during the summer? Share it with us in the comments!