Freezing & Melting

This week we learned about freezing & melting. It’s a perfect time of the year for us in Wisconsin to learn about freezing and melting. We’ve had some warm, warm days for November and into December! Like 60° and then back down to 30°! So mostly freezing, but then a little melting too.

Dripping Water Art

We started with Dripping Water Art. When water melts, it drips. This can be demonstrated by boiling water and collecting the steam and watching the condensation drip down the container.

We could actually see this happening on our window, so we went with that.

Instead of putting up the large easel, we put blocks under the trays to angle them so the paint would drip on the paper. A simple fix that made the watercolor paints really drip! I’m a big believer in using what you have and making what you have work. It’s the name of the game in family child care!

Using liquid watercolors in blue and purple with silver glitter paint mixed in, we squeezed watercolors from pipettes onto our paper and watched it drip.

I showed them how they could tilt their trays to make the paint drip even more.

Dripping water makes beautiful designs!

My Little Journals

On this day we also started working in our Mother Goose Time My Little Journals. On the front page I encouraged them to draw snowmen.

This month our shape is the square so this little guy is using the shape stencils to draw squares.

We will be focusing on numbers 7 and 8 this month so she’s tracing number 8 on her page with the hands on numbers from Experience Curriculum.

Circle stencils to make a snowman.

Inside the My Little Journals is a page of prompts for each page but usually, I let my group do what they will in their journals. I make suggestions but as long as they are writing, drawing or coloring, I’m happy! With a mixed age group it’s a bit difficult to get everyone on the same page – literally!!

Freezing & Melting Science

Using a couple empty Voss bottles, we melted and froze some water. I partially filled one bottle with water and marked the level of the water with a dry erase marker. I noted the time on top of the bottle that we put it in the freezer. In the other bottle, we put several frozen watercolor paint ice cubes inside to observe while they melted.

It took about 2.5 hours to melt the ice cubes and around 4 hours to freeze the water. It was fun to open the freezer and check on it!

Reading about Freezing & Melting

Freezing and Melting is a wonderful book to learn about liquids and solids.

It’s full of terminology and beautiful images that give a close look at freezing and melting. There is an experiment suggestion in the back of the book as well. We went outside and looked for our own examples of freezing and melting.

Materials We Use