Melting Ice Science Experiment

• Bowls or dishes (for making the ice)
• A large tray with sides
• Salt
• Liquid watercolors or food coloring
• Droppers or a spoon

Step #1) Make The Ice

For fun, and for experiment’s sake, I filled many different sizes of bowls with water and left them to freeze overnight.

I recommend this! Not so much for quantity, but I’d suggest trying at least two or three different sizes. Make at least one of them shallow.

The Tupperware container you can barely see in the back of the photo above was great for this.

Step #2) Set Up Your Melting Station

The next morning, I loosened the ice from the bowls with a little warm water and set them in a big plastic finger paint tray with a raised edge.

I remembered how much the ice melted last time— that’s the point, right?! —and I didn’t want a salty, painty mess all over my table.

A baking tray with sides would also work. I also set our tray over an old towel for extra protection.

Step#3) Add Salt

Maia’s friend Stella was over for the morning and the three girls were very excited about the melting ice science experiment!

I gave them each a bowl of table salt (inexpensive Morton’s salt) and they sprinkled it over the tops of the ice domes.

Two notes: Rock salt, or another coarse salt, would be good to try as well, but we didn’t have any. (I did have some sea salt in the kitchen, but felt it was too expensive to use like this.)

Also, I purposely gave them each a modest amount to sprinkle. I didn’t want a repeat of the salt dumping excuse for a science experiment we had last time on.

Once we could tell that the salt was melting the ice, I got out the liquid watercolors. I squeezed a little bit of a few different colors (yellow, pink, purple, turquoise) into jelly jars and added a dropper to each.

Note: You can also use food coloring for this project. The color selection may be more limited, but it works just as well.

The girls squeezed the watercolors onto the ice.

The color is beautiful on its own, but the real reason for adding the liquid watercolors is to highlight the ravines, crevasses, and tunnels that are forming in the ice as the salt melts it.