I saw this great activity on Chasing Cherrios a had to give it a whirl here. It was such a hit my freezer is sure to be filled with little containers of frozen rocks, pinecones and plastic kangaroos for the foreseeable future.
Huck had a blast doing this activity. i had a blast doing it too and once i left him to his own devices with it, I had a blast with the long amount of time he was occupied with excavating his treasures. But aside from the fun and the duration, he really learned a lot.
We talked a lot about cold and how extreme cold changes water into ice. We talked about heat and how it melts ice. We experimented with warm water and the sun to melt some of our blocks. He was very excited to gather things more things to freeze so we had a nice experiment with what worked well for this project and what didn't--flowers were very pretty in the ice but hard to get out. We also excavated a few of our blocks before they were really ready so they had water-filled, unfrozen centers giving us the chance to learn that things freeze from the outside in. Very cool. And we used a variety of small hand tools to chip the ice away so the fine motor skills were at work as well as the noggin.
An all-around great activity that I'm sure to get bored of in short order love all summer. Try it. Thanks Melissa!
