Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Chip Away Iceberg Activity

It has a been a laid back week here with all of the kids under the weather and they've been so kind as to share their sickies with me. None of us have wanted to do much so far this week. There's been a few Disney movies watched in the last couple of days, but Tuesday afternoon was nice and hot and was the perfect day to do our Chip Away Iceberg activity. I saw this on  Pinterest at the beginning of summer and thought it would be great for a hot summer day. It's an easy activity with very little prep work. Basically, it's a giant ice cube with toys in it that the children chip away at to get the toys out.

All I did was fill two glass bread pans with water, add food coloring to the water (because everything is better with a little color), put small toys in the water (I used small animal figurines and cars from Dollar Tree), then freeze overnight. Or, like I did, leave it in your deep freezer for over a week until the temps warmed up. Being the thinker I am, I decided to line the pans with plastic wrap, thinking I could easily just pull the giant ice cube out and pull the wrap off. For those of you smarter than I, you will know why this did not work at all. Not even in the slightest. Another lesson learned for me at least! The plastic wrap stuck to the ice and didn't just peel away nicely. Although, the kids were pleasantly surprised when they picked out pieces of plastic wrap from the ice.

When the kids and weather were ready for the activity, I simply took the pans out of the freezer and put directly into warm water. I got them loose enough in the pans to just tip it over and the "iceberg" fell out onto the patio. I grabbed a few different play tools for the kids to use to chip away the ice. It didn't take long for the hot sun to start melting the icebergs away, making the chipping easy. The kids were pretty excited to see what toys were stuck in the ice.

The kids weren't overly enthused by this activity although it did keep them busy and hammering away at the ice for 20 minutes with no complaints. The boys enjoyed attempting to eat the ice more than actually chipping away. This is probably not an activity I'll do again with them, even though it's very little prep work and doesn't involve any cost. I don't feel the kids got much out of the activity and didn't take anything away from it. Either way, I'll still happily take the 20 minutes of trying to eat the ice and playing with the melting "iceberg" than nothing at all!


Pay no attention to all of the colorings we have on the patio from all of our experiments, or the black burns from doing snakes on July 4th. This patio has seen some fun times this summer!