Ice Luminaries

I've been on Winter Break for a week now and wish it would last more like a month!  When you think about it, it's a loooooooong haul starting in mid-August and going until the end of November for our first bit of time off (4 days) and then finishing up the quarter to have 2 whole weeks off at Christmas time.  And if you're like any teacher, you're catching up on things you haven't had time to do and spending time with your family.

I love to do fun things with my 5-year-old and so the other day we made ice luminaries.  I saw something about it in the paper one weekend and thought it would be fun to try.  My class recently started a new science kit: The Power of Water and we'll soon be doing the "3 States of Matter" lesson and this fun activity fit right in, so I may have to do it with my students too.

Here's the final product

There are 5 of them lining the sidewalk up to our front door.

I didn't follow any particular directions and just went on what I thought would work.  But of course I had to tweak it and we added food coloring.  I learned the hard way though how to do it without having hands that end up like this

1. First add food coloring drops to the empty balloon.

2. Then attach it to the faucet and fill it up as big as you'd like.

3. Next tie off the balloon and place it in the freezer or outside.

4. Finally drill holes in the top (round) of the sphere until a tea light candle fits 

    down into the hole.

Before I drilled holes in them, we sat staring at them up close because they were so cool!  Each ice globe had, what looked like, a frozen porcupine inside it.

 And, interestingly, the food coloring (blue) didn't show up at all.  So we made 2 more the next night with red food coloring and made sure to add more drops.  It worked as about 50% of the globe was red.

You've got to try this, either at home or school because it's so cool...no pun intended :-)