Colored Ice Sensory Play {Plus Soap & Water Play}

I was so excited to try a colored ice sensory play activity with the little man this last week! One morning after preparing breakfast, I got out the ingredients & equipment I would need to make the colored ice. My plan was to take him outside after nap time and let him go wild with fun! Mother Nature didn’t approve of my plan apparently, because that afternoon we had a terrible storm…the storms continued through the night and into the next morning. I felt horrible that I had no other activities planned for that time since we were going to have outside ice play; finally I broke down and let little man do his sensory activity in the kitchen sink. It wasn’t my favorite option, but I always try to make the best out of situations!

All you need to have tons of fun with water & colored ice sensory play is water, food coloring, and ice cube trays. {How cute are these ones from IKEA? I LOVE them}.

I only added one drop of food coloring per 1 C. of water… Once melted during play the colors weren’t very noticeable. If you aren’t concerned about staining I would definitely recommend something closer to 4-6 drops of color.

A medicine syringe was the perfect tool to easily transfer the water into the ice trays without making a huge, colorful mess!

Of course, we had to wait 24 hours to play with these babies, but I estimated actual freezing time to be approximately 2 hours.

To prepare for play, I filled one side of the sink with luke-warm water, thinking it would provide a really obvious difference between the water and the ice cubes to give a more noticeable sensory experience. But I didn’t think too far ahead on that and the ice cubes melted extremely fast! My suggestion if you’re planning on using warm water would be to make more than 2 trays of ice cubes.

Little man is very particular about things and he didn’t like that one ice cube was in the sink while the rest were in a bowl. His first order of business was to drop each ice cube individually into the sink. It’s so fun to hear the ‘plop’ and get splashed!

Then he took the long, red ice and stirred up the water. You can start to see a hint of purple showing up in the water by now.

As I said before, the ice melted really quickly; however, little man was not ready to stop playing. Thinking quickly, I switched our Colorful Ice Sensory Play into Soap & Water Play {nice save mommy}!

I let him use the whisk to really whip up the bubbles…he did a great job!

Little man enjoyed scooping the water in one of his small snack cups and dumping it into the empty side of the sink.

But the best fun of the day was using the baster to squirt mommy! It took him a few tries, but he finally figured out how to use the baster.

All-in-all this was a wonderful sensory play experience for little man. Things don’t always turn out the way we planned, but sometimes when we think on our feet we can come up with something just as fun!

Check out these super fun {and possibly educational} ice cube trays from amazon.com!

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