We continue our A-Z Sensory Play series with the letter I. After our Icy Eyes Monster Sensory Play For Kids we couldn’t resist using the letter I to create an Ice Hand Sensory Bin.
As you will see when you read how the activity was created, every play is a bit of try and test. And even very often, things we did in the past, don’t go as planned. We are not always Pinterest perfect either. And it’s ok. The purpose of these play activities is to bond with our children, to expose them to new senses, to explore. Picture perfect is a plus. But not a must. Just enjoy the play! Create memories!
The previous night I created 5 Ice Hands. To achieve this, I filled five latex gloves with water. Each of the gloves had different coloured water and a Halloween themed item. I then tied the glove in a knot at the top. The gloves contained:
- orange food colouring and pumpkin table confetti
- blue food colouring and four eye ping pong balls
- purple food colouring and googly eyes
- green food colouring and small plastic spiders
- yellow food colouring and large plastic spiders
We use Wilton Food Coloring for our sensory play, to be safe.
I then laid the gloves down flat in our freezer and left them over night.
Getting the iced hands out of the latex gloves was certainly harder than I imagined. The tie in the glove had frozen inside the ice so I couldn’t remove this from two of the hands.
Many of the gloves’ fingers had frozen together and this meant they broke away easily. We were left with very few fingers attached to the frozen hand.
My own hands also got extremely cold whilst removing the latex glove. As a result we only used three hands during our play. We will use the two spider ice hands another time.
I placed the three ice hands into our green sensory bin. The object of the activity was to get the ice hands to melt. I gave my son a spray bottle filled with table salt and warm water and let him explore the contents of the bin. Using the spray bottle was a great way to develop fine motor skills. As he sprayed the ice hands with the warm salt water they slowly began to melt.
However, my son wanted the ice to melt quicker so he asked if he could pour the salt directly onto the ice hands. As the table salt fell onto the ice hands we could see and hear the ice cracking.
However, the ice hands were still pretty much intact. This led to a conversation about how ice and snow melts. My son asked what would melt the ice really quickly. He said that the warm water melted it a little bit so would very hot water melt it even quicker. We decided to test it out. I made sure my son was not within arms reach of the sensory bin and we discussed the dangers of boiling water. I then poured the boiling water over each of the ice hands.
The effect of the boiling water on the ice hands was instant. The fingers suddenly shrunk and the Halloween items were freed from the ice. Once the boiling water had cooled then the sensory play could commence again. My son continued exploring the ice hands with the table salt until the ice had completely melted.
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