Frozen Treasures

Spring here in Maine has been pretty indecisive this year!

Warm, HOT, chilly, we even saw SNOW on Easter!! And this week hasn't been any different with temperatures ranging from below freezing to high 80s!

We are so grateful though to finally see the sunshine and are spending every possible second outside that we can!! :)

With the up and down temps we aren't quite ready to fill up the pool or even the water table but, we did need to find some way to stay cool on those few glorious sunshiny days!

We had played with buckets of ice a few bright days ago but, today I wanted to find something new to engage Eds mind and hands.

So we took the ice concept a bit further and made mini "ice treasures"! Individual ice blocks with animals frozen inside!

To create the individual treasures we used a muffin tin! Filled it with water, placed a miniature bug, dino or animal in each and froze!

We placed them in our water table already home to our beloved beach rock alphabet and watched to see what happened once introduced to the sun.

They began to melt!...FAST! and soon we could feel feet, tails and heads!

Not fast enough for Ed though! :) So he began to experiment.

He placed the spider on the driveway to see if it would melt faster, it provided us with a great visual of where the ice(water) went!

To pass the time on the driveway, artist Ed was chalking up some beautiful pics! And as it always goes, we drew about 100 "E"s and wrote out his name.

He then asked to see the animal names :)

When that proved to be too slow still, he decided to excavate!

Such a little worker worker :)))

When we were done watching ice melt and all our little hidden treasures were mostly free, Ed wanted to talk about the sounds that began each animals name!

And of course, in between all this exploration were silly songs of Itsy Bitsy Spiders, 5 Green and Speckled Frogs and Little Black Bugs Floating On The Water :)))

Id say overall our little ice experiment was a success and will probably become one of our favorite sunny day activities!
xo