Every week, during Fun for Kids Friday, there are always unique ideas that catch my eye. What I love the most is finding 100% do-able kid's activities for moms like me who are busy and don't have tons of money to spend on entertaining the kids.
This idea, from Poor Badger Creations, has stuck with me. It couldn't get any simpler. It's free. It's easy. And, it's pretty darn earth friendly. It's one of those activities that moms or teachers could do anywhere. No matter how much money or resources you have or don't have.
Step 1: Let your kids pick out some small toys from the bottom of the toy box.
Step 2: Have the kids find a few plastic cups/containers or paper cup from your recycle bin. The cup in the photo above is just a paper cup from McDonald's that we recycled.
Step 3: Let your kids put the toys in the cups and fill them up about 75% with cold water. If the toys are floating to the top, you can poke a popsicle stick through the cup (right above the water line) to keep the toys submerged.
Step 4: Place the cups in your freezer.
My 5 year old loved preparing this activity. To him, picking out the toys and filling up the cups was just as fun as the end result. He kept checking the freezer to see if they were ready. When the water was completely frozen, we just ran some warm water on the outside of the cup to remove the new frozen toy.
Take it outside on a warm day and let your kids play. As you can see from the photo above, you don't need any special toys to freeze. We use little mismatched pieces of old toys like a rubber wheel that fell off a toy truck, a slinky that came in a party favor bag, and a building piece.
My kids loved discovering their 'new' frozen toys and slippery feeling of the ice. They played with them for about 10 minutes and then wanted to smash them to get the toys out (gotta love boys!) Obviously, if you're going to be using small toys/pieces of ice, you need to be careful with small children to make sure nothing poses a choking hazard. But, my 3 and 5 year old loved doing this, and we'll probably be freezing our toys all summer long!