Ice Treasures

Another inspiration from Pinterest lead us to making ice treasures!  What are ice treasures?  It's all your child's cheapy beloved smallish toys (or gems, shells, etc) "hidden" in a block of ice that they break apart to fish their treasures out.  Little Guy had such a good time with this project!  This activity does take an entire day of prep, so plan ahead if you decide to do it!  We took a leftover food container and put about an inch of water in the bottom, along with a few toys and let it freeze for a while (we did this because I wanted treasures to be throughout the ice.  If you don't care, you can just add the toys and water all at once- also all the toys we picked happened to float, so we needed a way to hold them down).  Once that section was frozen, we added another section of water and toys, and so on until the top of the container was reached.  FYI in case you forgot the laws of physics or whatever dictates that water expands while reaching the frozen state, you may want to leave a little bit of space on top so water doesn't spill over as it's freezing, thus creating some pretty cool icicles in the freezer (unless you want really cool icicles, that is!)  Once your ice block is complete, you can experiment with different methods on getting all those little treasures out:

adding salt

You could turn it into a learning experience and have your child add salt, while talking about how salt is put on roads in the winter to keep the roads from freezing over (this of course was lost on my FL boy- and even harder for this FL girl to explain!), and we added some food coloring so he could watch the ice melt (which was a slow process since we didn't have Kosher salt).  It was neat to watch the food coloring sink through the ice as it melted.  (Idea pinned from here.)

adding food coloring

the cool effects of salt and food coloring

 If your child is slightly impatient, as mine is, you could resort to more drastic measures {enter hammer here}

getting to work with the hammer

Once our block of ice was in the sun for a bit, we were able to free it from its confinement of the container and it was much easier to break apart:

chasing a stray piece of ice to pulverize it

I would however, advise against freezing a plastic bead necklace if you're going to break the ice with a hammer.  We have bits of broken up blue beads scattered on our pool deck!  The beads did not like to be hammered into oblivion, apparently!  ;)

Once the ice started to easily break off, Little Guy decided to give it a little taste test.  I'm guessing that these pieces did not have any remnants of salt on them, as he claimed that they were yummy!

He also thought it would be hilarious to throw the ice in the pool and watch it melt!  He wondered if it would make the pool cold (doubtful since the heater was on).  This kid is one smart cookie!

Gold Deb-loon!

This was such a fun project, we have another block of ice in the works for Father's Day weekend for something fun to do while Mommy is working.  Have fun hunting for ice treasures with your little!  (or if you don't have a little and want to have fun doing this, you may want to be hidden from the general public as you may look a little peculiar chasing a block of ice with a hammer! LOL)