I love Becca’s blog called Fun & Engaging Activities for Toddlers! She has some great ideas on there for activities that you can do with your little ones. You should check it out. Remember, I have been on a quest to come up with some new ideas with the twins on how to teach them their colors. With 12 month olds, it has to be something hands-on so they can experience color through all of their senses. We do some flash cards while they are sitting in their highchairs, but flash cards for colors are not really all that engaging. So when I saw Becca’s blog post Color Mixing With Ice, I got a great idea.
What you Need:
Ice Cube Trays
Large Mixing Bowl
Food Coloring
Ice
Water Play Table, Plastic Tub, Wash Basin, or Bathtub
Measuring Cubs, Old Plastic Contains (ex. yogurt containers), and large spoons
Prep:
1. In a large mixing bowl combine water and food coloring (color of your choice)
2. Pour the colored water into the ice cube trays and freeze over night.
Activity:
3. The next day take the colored ice cubes and place them in a large plastic container and bring them outside to play with (or inside inside a bathtub)
2. Let your child have fun experimenting with these ice cubes inside a water play table, wash basin, plastic tub, or bathtub filled with water. Give your child some measuring cups, spoons, and old plastic containers to pick up the ice cubes with and put them inside a container filled with water.
Note: The food coloring might stain your child’s clothing. I let the girls play with the ice cubes in just a diaper. You could let your child play with this naked in the bathtub or with old clothing on that would not matter if it gets stained.
How I used this activity:
So far we used this to work on the color yellow. The girls seemed to enjoy this activity. I just played along side of them and talked about the color yellow ice cubes and then also talked about how they were melting and turning into yellow water. The girls just got a new water play table so I let them play with the ice cubes in their new water play table. This activity held their attention for quiet a while, 15-20 minutes. The ice cubes all melted by the time the activity was over. Great warm summer day activity.
This would be a great activity to teach mixing colors to create new colors, Color Mixing With Ice, like Becca suggested. I plan on doing that activity with my 2.5 year old son this coming week.
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