Ice Cube Painting

(This is the other bad picture I took. I apologize. Hopefully my camera won't do this all the time!)

We love to paint using ice cubes. Generally, this involves a colored ice cube and something to hold it with, like a stick. In the picture above we used cotton swabs instead of the more traditional popsicle stick since the last time we did this all the kids thought they were popsicles. As the cube melts it leaves paint on paper. This has a nice watercolor effect even if you freeze tempera paint.

I've done this with straight liquid watercolor (only for classes that aren't prone to self-painting), watered-down liquid watercolor, food coloring in water, and watered down tempera paint. All of them work well. For the paper I like to use manila construction paper.

When we did this last week the cubes weren't melting very quickly, for some reason. It took a little while, but one child figured out how to warm the ice cube in her hand and then paint. Then you also have a painty hand that can make a handprint, which is what most of them did. It's not often you can capture watercolor handprints, so it was a nice bonus.

We did get one girl who insisted that the red ones were popsicles this time. No matter what we did she insisted on putting them in her mouth, so by the time she was done sucking and we were done throwing out the ones she had put in her mouth everyone had to live with purple paint only. We redirected her several times but she kept coming back as soon as she sensed our attention was elsewhere. Can you tell she's in a testing limits phase? Good thing I really like three-year olds!