Summer days can become very long days. As much as we love swimming, traveling, and visiting playgrounds and sprinklers; there are times when we just want to chill out at home and not feel the pressure of doing something else. This activity is a quick and easy two-phase project so it has many possibilities to be used as an incentive. It is great to be used as something to look forward to later if a parent or child has to leave to go somewhere, or when you are waiting for someone to come home. I love to use this as a bribe for nap time because the first phase needs some “resting” time.
Items Needed:
- Small Plastic Sea Creatures (Something like these Sea Creatures )
- Ice Cube Trays
- Measuring Cup
- Pitcher
- Crayola Color Bath Dropz
Steps to Create Your Frozen Creatures:
- Take a pitcher and fill it with water. Have the kiddos pick a color from the tabs. Let them put the tabs in the pitcher and watch the tabs dissolve and transform the water.
- Have the kiddos put the sea animals in the ice cube trays.
- Pour the colored water from the pitcher into the measuring cups. These are more manageable for the kiddos to pour into the ice trays, after all this is their project.
- Have the kiddos pour the colored water over the sea creatures.
- Now the best part – is NAP TIME/quiet time or whatever time. It takes time to freeze the animals so they have to wait. For my kiddos, I do it before lunch and tell them they will be frozen when they wake up from their nap. Which works perfectly for us!
- Once they have frozen and everyone has hopefully rested it’s playtime! We start by cracking the ice trays into our water table or a plastic bin.
- They then get to use whatever toys they have and if the water table they use water to help defrost and “free” the animals.
They have a blast every time! You can do this over and over again and create a different experience with different animals or creatures and/or different colors! Give us feedback, let us know what you loved, liked, and maybe some improvements you made. Enjoy your time with the fishes!