Water Fun

The other day we decided to make the most of the insane heat and have some fun water play. The day before I had filled up a milk carton and four plastic cups with water and froze them overnight. The milk carton I filled with plain water, and in the three of the four plastic cups I put water with red, yellow and blue food coloring, respectively, along with another of plain water.

The first one we took out was the milk carton. I tore the carton off, revealing a large glistening block of ice. The Owl thought this was really cool. We played around with it and he used a plastic cake server to try to chip away at it, but it remained fairly intact.

The ice blocks in the cups came out really cool- when I added the drops of food coloring to the water, I did not stir it, just swirled it around a bit, and it ended up making it really cool, with areas that were more saturated than others. We filled up the baby pool and added the ice to the water. We found that they began to melt very quickly in the pool, so The Owl took out the blocks and left them in the grass where they melted much more slowly. The large block had been left on the picnic table, and when we went back to it, we found it hadn’t melted much. We carried it over and dropped it into the pool, where it proceeded to melt very very quickly.

All in all, it was a fun and colorful way to observe “reversible change.”