Ice sun catchers

So with the bitter cold the kids and I have had lots of fun freezing things outside. Our last experiment ended up with something pretty to look at too.

You will need:

Container - an old take out container or similar shallow plastic dish is perfect
Ice tray
Cup
Water
Food coloring
String or Twine

To begin the kids mixed up some food coloring with water and froze it in the ice cube trays. (This could be done in your freezer but it took less than 30 minutes here in the NE with our cold days.)

Once the ice trays are frozen I helped the kids pop the cubes out into their shallow dishes, they each chose a mix of colors. Once they were in we added a cup to the center and poured in cold water to form a shallow layer.

Then we took the dishes outside to freeze again, all of them decided Mummy could go out alone this time as it was too cold!

Once they were frozen we removed the cup from the center and tried to pop out the ice circles. This proved tricky for D who's 3, his broke and we had tears, but no problem we simply 'glued it' with a little more water and put it out to freeze for longer. It worked.

We threaded string through the hole and took them out to tie to our tree's. They really are very beautiful don't you think? Looby was the most excited, I think she'd like to have them strung all over.

I'm thinking if this cold weather lasts we will try to do this again but next time I'm going to dig out all my valentines pans and we will have pink hearts to entertain the birds. What do you think?