So the trade off of all the AWESOME benefits of living in Texas is that you accept the month of August feels like you are living on the surface of the sun. We are blessed with air conditioning and anywhere you go that is indoors is cool too. But children need outside time so I tried to come up with some “cold” fun for the girls. We took our niece to see IKEA when she was visiting and while I was there I picked up 4 of their shaped ice cube trays. They are only $.99 each if you can get to the store. I also picked up some of their kid sized baking and ice cream toy sets for $.99 a set. I made an assortment of the cubes with food coloring in the water. I had the girls get on their bathing suits and put everything outside in the shade of the play set.
They had so much fun!! I told them they could eat the ice cubes which they thought was awesome! They pretending they were cooking, baking and running a restaurant. This week we had a friend over for a play date and they quickly asked if they could show her how much fun the ice cubes were. It was great.
Our other “cold” fun involved the awesome water beads I have posted about before. I made a bunch of water beads in assorted colors, put them in small portion cups, added water and froze them.
I set the girls up with 3 frozen water bead pods each in a plastic shoebox. I added a containers of water and some other kitchen tools. They both got really excited about when they saw the set up. For this activity I made sure they knew these couldn’t go in their mouth.
They started out pretending they were cooking with them and running an ice cream shop. Very quickly Nadia started talking in science terms. She wanted to see what would happen to the ice and water beads if you held it in your hand or if you dumped water on them. Then she set one of them in the sun to see it melt. She was curious if the water beads were going to stay in one piece when it defrosted or if they would fall apart. They played with these for a very long time.
Nadia found that once they melted, they disintegrated. Then they proceed to smear them all over their arms and legs and say it was lotion. Near the end of playtime they smeared them all down the slide to see if they could go faster 🙂
I gave them 3 at a time and it seemed to be just the right amount for all the inventive ways they decided to use these. They have asked to do this a couple more times and had just as much fun as the first time. This is a big hit and I will be making up another batch to keep in the freezer soon.
The widget below is an affiliate link for Amazon that shows some of the stuff we used in this activity 🙂