Ice Castles

Every year when we are studying winter we have Ice Day. This is the day we build fantastic ice castles.

The children's homework is to make some ice and find cool things to put into their ice. We encourage different shapes and sizes, and sometimes the children are quite creative!

The base of our ice castles is block ice, which is becoming harder to find in the stores. The sheer size and weight of these blocks is impressive, and you can do really neat things with salt and colored water on an ice block.

After examining and exclaiming over each child's ice contributions, we work together to build our ice castles. The children shake lots of salt onto the ice. Why does it make them stick together? Once the castles are built just as we want them, we bring out colored water with eye droppers. By now the salt has melted little tunnels into the surface of the ice, just perfect for squirting colored water into them! As one Dolphin child said, "We're doing science!"

The Orca class adds to the ice exploration by making ice cream in a zip lock bag. This takes some time with a partner rolling the bag wrapped in a towel back and forth between them. We have found singing helps make it go faster. Our "snow" ice cream mountains are served up with Teddy Graham climbers!