Sensory | Excite and Explore

So recently I saw this neat post on Learn Play Imagine about coloured ice play and I thought we would give it a try and share some ways to play with coloured ice. It is really easy to make, and we used the put the food colouring in the ice cube tray before water method, which left us with really nice, evenly coloured ice. I put two drops of food colouring for each ice cube and added water.

I also made some bigger pucks using more food colouring and some glass cups.

I left it over night in the freezer, and since the weather was lovely today I pulled it out in the afternoon to have some fun. (I turned on the hot water and ran the sides of the cup under the water to loosen it to get the pucks out.)

I left the cubes in a bowl by the water table and released the toddler, after stripping him to his diaper and a hat since I wasn’t into scrubbing food colouring out of his clothes. He was really curious as to what exactly these were, so in typical small child fashion he tried to eat them, but once he discovered that they weren’t anything special he started off by using them as building blocks, which was quite the challenge since, being made of ice, they were pretty slippery and slightly rounded from the mould.

I dubbed this our castle. I had a sudden thought and brought out a Kleenex and we put three different coloured ice cubes on it and left it on the deck to melt.

Which melted into this really cool tye-dye like piece, that we hung up to dry in the sun.

Then they went into the water table, swirling around and colouring the water. This was all done in-between attempts to eat the ice cubes, since he seemed convinced that they would taste different than the last time.

That was our adventure with coloured ice! We would love to hear your ideas for playing with this cooling activity, thank you for joining us at Excite and Explore!

Easter is fast approaching and we have been getting ready in our house. Yesterday I read on how to dye corn kernels for sensory fun or crafts and knew I had to try it, so I decided to make an Easter sensory bin. You can find the tutorial here on Fun-A-Day. http://fun-a-day.com/how-to-dye-corn-kernels/ It was an easy tutorial but I wanted to make some fun colours. I made the recipe without adding the food colouring, I made 3 batches. I used this neon food colouring I found at Zehrs.

After a bit of experimentation I made these.

The purple is 1 table spoon of the purple dye, simple enough. For the green/teal colour I used 1 teaspoon of the blue and 1/4 a teaspoon plus 10 drops of the green. Lastly for the neat deep orange I used 1 teaspoon of green, 1/4 a teaspoon of purple and 1/4 a teaspoon of pink. These measurements are for every 2 cups of corn. I let them soak overnight as instructed. In the morning I spread paper towel on baking sheets and drained the excess liquid with a strainer and gave them a quick rinse (not to long) and spread the kernels evenly over the paper towel, dabbing the tops with another piece. (If you don’t let them soak over night you won’t get as vibrant a colouring.) An hour later I removed the paper towel, dried the pans and spread out the kernels again, and left them for a further 6 hours, shifting their position once to help speed up the process.

It turned out wonderfully! They are so vibrant and bright! I threw in some Easter eggs, the hollow plastic ones. I filled one with some of the kernels to use as a shaker and added some fluff, different types of eggs, a little plastic bunny and a scoop.

We brought it outside to play with since it was so nice out and we’ve really missed the sunshine this winter. He had a great time scooping and pouring and really liked the shaker. Hopefully this will inspire you to create some Easter fun of your own, thank you for reading and please join us again at Excite and Explore!