To begin our second week of winter/Christmas activities we read about why snow is white from my boys science book and did this melting snowman experiment.
This ended up taking two days since their snowmen needed to freeze after they made them. This is another project my boys wanted to do. Only two of mine managed to make the “snow” the right consistency to make a snowball. Everyone else just made a cup snowman. In the end this project was a hit!

Just needed a few more eye droppers before we do something like it again.

We only had one and that made it time consuming and patience testing.

ha

Next we melted ice!

And yes, I had to say it like that to try to get my girls into it…

Adding the watercolors to be able to see the path the salt was taking ended up being really interesting and they actually liked it. We tried different types of salt and the girls figured out that the bigger chunks of salt were not the fastest at making the ice melt. The site suggested making thin ice sheets but I did not have room in my freezer for 5 of those so I just used plastic cups and it worked fine.

I like that the site talks about why the salt helps it melt faster, it made it nice and easy to make this a lesson. Just be warned, if your child chooses red it will look like a crime scene… Next we watched “The Legend of the Candy Cane” on youtube and did a melting candy cane experiment.

I can’t find the blog post I used but I know there are several out there that are basically the same thing.

We just did cold water, hot water, and vinegar and they guessed which one would melt first.

After all the excitement of the hands on projects this one did not hold my girls interest much.

They prefer to make a mess and get their hands dirty.

What is your kids favorite hands on project?

Please don’t say slime…