Ice Melt Science Experiment {Saturday Science}

Ice Melt Science Experiment

Preschool Water Science & Saturday Science Blog Hop

We love water themed science experiments!

This time we thought we would add some water colors to really illustrate what happens when salt erodes the ice and prevents it from refreezing! We even turned it into a cool painting activity as the ice melted and the colors ran together. The science of why ice prevents water from refreezing is a little difficult to explain to my preschooler but watching what happens and talking about what he sees is an excellent start to future experiments!

Quick and Easy Set Up:

Since it is still fall I thought I would use our pumpkin ice-cube tray and make pumpkin cubes! I don’t think it mattered much to Liam but they were cute. He actually thought they looked like igloos which may have been more appropriate! I let him pop them out into a baking dish to contain the mess. I also prepared a dish of salt and water colors for testing and observing!

Testing The Ice Melt Science Experiment!

The first part of the experiment was simply with the salt and ice pumpkin-gloos! Great idea to break out a magnifying glass. He could watch the salt work at the ice. We didn’t really talk about ions mixing with water to change temperature to prevent refreezing, but you could! We did talk about how water can be both a solid and a liquid! Now to better illustrate what is happening between the salt and the ice, we used some water color paints (food coloring works too). You can really see where the color goes and how much the salt has changed the ice!

Extend the Ice Melt Science Experiment!

Liam decided he wanted to paint with the watercolors, ice and salt. I happily obliged and got him a large piece of paper. He took the partially melted hunks of ice out of the dish and painted with them on the paper. He put more salt on the paper and used the water colors to paint the salt. We watched the salt absorb the paint and make cool effects

The ice of course continued to melt and he added more salt and more paint!

He painted for quite a while until there was no more white space and quite a few puddles!

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