Exploring the snow at The Rainbow

The children at The Rainbow have shown a strong interest in ice and snow. Many of the children have been longing for snow since last year! We have been exploring ice by trying to “rescue” some of the children’s toys from blocks of ice. We tried a variety of methods, salt, warm water and cold water. The children noticed that warm water worked best, but it took a long time to fill up jugs of water to poor on ice. A child suggested that maybe we could put the ice in the sink, and run warm water over the ice, the ice then melted really fast!

We have also used ice to complete our creative projects. The children made ice frames for some beautiful drawings and displayed them outside our preschool for the parents to enjoy. The ice gave the pictures an unusual shiny quality which some of the children likened to Elsa’s ice magic in the Frozen films.

Over the past week we have been exploring our local area which has been transformed by the recent snowfall! We have been sledging most days, and have made sculptures in the snow. Many of the children worked together to create a snow octopus! We have been watching the snow and ice melt for the past few days. We have noticed small streams of water coming from the melting snow and ice and we have compared them to our experiences of rescuing the toys from ice by adding warm water. We hope for some more cold weather soon!