I is for Ice Sensory Play for Kids
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I would like to welcome Mihaela from Best Toys 4 Toddlers to share with you all a fun ice sensory play for kids idea.
It’s fun to participate in A-Z of Sensory Play for Kids series on Golden Reflections blog! My kids love sensory play and both of my daughters enjoy playing with ice. We have used ice in several activites before for sensory play, including making soup with water beads and ice.
For today’s activity we decided to mix sensory play with a bit of science! We decided to try to freeze several other liquids to see how it would look and feel when it’s frozen. And we used what we had at home: milk, carbonated drink (Coca-Cola) and water. We just poured each of these liquids in their own container and let it freeze for few hours.
It was fun to see how different were the textures of these liquids once it was frozen. Water had slick transparent color moving towards white. Milk was very silky at touch, white color and with a bit of yellow (from milk fat). Carbonated beverage was full of holes, very rough surface, light brown color.
Of course, we had to crash it to see how would it break and what crystals look like and my kids loved this part of our sensory play. Who wouldn’t enjoy banging on ice? For this part of our little exploration we used deep plastic bin. Frozen water and carbonated drink broke very unevenly and with rough edges. Pieces were of different size and shape. Frozen milk broke differently. It created chunks with much smoother surface and they were much more compact. Another thing we noticed is that water seem to be the most resilient to our plastic hammer and it was the hardest to break.
After some time, my toddler decided she needs to cook all of this. Somehow, most of our sensory play activities end up in kid’s kitchen! She continued to play until it was all back to liquid form. You can only imagine what mixture this was at the end!
Mihaela runs Best Toys 4 Toddlers blog and loves to come up with new ideas how to use old toys her 2 daughters keep leaving on the floor to slip over. Right now she’s thinking how to get her 7 year old to make toys for 2 year old as an idea to bring them closer together. In mean time, you can find her on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest sharing playful learning ideas for toddlers and preschoolers.
For more sensory activity ideas be sure to follow my sensory fun Pinterest board and the A-Z's of Sensory Play for Kids series.
Heather Greutman, COTA
Heather Greutman is a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant with experience in school-based OT services for preschool through high school. She uses her background to share child development tips, tools, and strategies for parents, educators, and therapists. She is the author of many ebooks including The Basics of Fine Motor Skills, and Basics of Pre-Writing Skills, and co-author of Sensory Processing Explained: A Handbook for Parents and Educators.
This looks like fun! And it won’t be a lot of work to set up. That’s the perfect kind of sensory play in my books! 😉