Making the best of the icy cold

It's been really, really cold here. Beautiful, but cold. Around noon it usually gets warmer and my cat ventures out. One day he sat on the porch, staring at me. He kept looking at the watering can and then back at me. He loves drinking water outside, but of course everything was frozen. So I filled a plastic cup with water and put it out on the porch. The cat drank and happily came back in again.

Then I forgot about it.

It was frozen solid the next day. When we took it in, we discovered a fuzzy looking shape in it. So we set out another one to see if that would end up looking the same. It did.

Sunday morning the kids took both ice cups in and started examining them and playing with them. After watching for a few minutes I finally remembered this great idea that Andrea of Four Flights of Fancy had posted recently: Colored Ice Sculptures. Of course! Off to the kitchen I went and grabbed some food coloring and my camera. Here's the result in a fraction of the gazillion pictures I took.

Big brother carefully poking at it. Poking seems to be an integral part of every science experiment here.

If you look closely you can see some of that fuzzy structure in the center.

Let's bring on the colors!

Little brother's first choice was, of course, yellow. Then he added some green, too. Yellow is not the perfect color for this project.

The red worked best, actually.

This does look somewhat gross, doesn't it? Maybe I should bookmark this as a Halloween activity...

So thanks for sharing, Andrea! This has been really fun and the kids loved it.

Cheers,
Swenja