Friday 4 September 2015

Toddler activity - ice eggs

Just one of those ideas I squirrelled away for a slow day - make an ice egg that you can then "hatch".


I don't have any photos of the process, because I literally took a few minutes to sort this out and then bung it in the freezer for when I needed it.

Essentially, you freeze a toy animal in a block of ice. The original idea I saw was for "dinosaur eggs". We were visiting The Living Rainforest (http://www.livingrainforest.org) and Little E really liked the frogs, so I picked him up a plastic frog from their gift shop.

The figurines need to be pretty small, as you squeeze them through the neck of a balloon. Even this little fella took a bit of wiggling. Then pour water into the balloon, tie off and stick in the freezer. Cut and peel off the balloon when you want it. Voila!

I was thinking about ideas of how to melt the egg. Since Little E is not quite 2, I thought I'd just go for some warm water. When he's older, I might try things like salt. Not sure I remember the science behind why that works....

Little E loves water play, so really enjoyed pouring the water and got really excited as the ice shrunk away. He then poured his cup of milk in too!


He kept exclaiming "Gone! Gone!" about the ice. It was really exciting. Little E then did something I didn't expect and began some imaginative play with the frog - getting it to leap around in its little pond. In the end we went outside to do some more pond building for our new little guy, i.e pouring buckets of water everywhere to make puddles. It was awesome.


So, that seemed to work well. Need to collect some more plastic creatures and balloons for another day.

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