The Lonely Ice Cube

There are moments in my day when I sometimes wonder what I was thinking...I somewhat thought this today while I was cleaning up huge puddles of water off of our table, floors and chairs.

The theme for our week in day care was a combination of things relating to the cold...water, snow, ice, animals that live in the cold. The curriculum that I use with the kids suggested that for an activity today that we play with some ice. Let the kids explore ice, let them see how ice melts when it meets with friction, let them try to build with ice...

I thought it was a good idea and that the kids would enjoy it so after our craft time today I got out all of the ice that was in our freezer, put them in 2 big bowls and dumped them on our glass table. We even did an experiment relating to our number that we talked about today and put 1 ice cube in a bowl and 11 (the number for today) ice cubes in another bowl to see which ice cubes melted faster. The kids were amazed!

While the ice cubes were melting in our bowls, the ice cubes on the table were melting much faster, especially the ice cubes that became hockey pucs that were flying over our glass table. The kids thought it was so cool that as they rubbed the ice cube back and forth between the table and their hand that it got smaller. Some of the ice cubes even stuck to their fingers at first and they were just shocked.

The kids stayed busy with the ice for about 30 minutes. We set the timer to help us remember to take a look at our experiment and monitored that several times throughout that time frame.

When we were all done, there were 5 kids that were really wet. All of their arm sleeves were soaked, some of their pants were all wet on the legs and that table had droplets of water coming off of it from the water that was almost running down the sides. The floor had several very large puddles under and beside the table. It was so wet that I just had to clean the floor rather than try to wipe it up.

Despite all the water that was absolutely everywhere in our kitchen, the kids learned that ice cubes that have friends with it melt slower than an ice cube all by itself.