Easy and Colorful Ice Painting Art for Toddlers and Preschoolers

This week’s preschool theme is ICE, I had a lovely idea to do ice painting this week since we haven’t really done much in the art department lately. I like my kids love to have a nice rounded week full of activities.

Be sure to read more about our mitten experiment too. Even more learning fun with ice.

Gather your supplies for ice painting!

First you need to make the ice blocks so that you can paint with them.

• an ice tray
• 1 tablespoon flour
• food coloring (i used these colors)
• popsicle sticks (craft sticks)
• paper

Ice painting directions

Fill your ice tray with water then empty the water into a bowl. This allows us to have the correct amount of water for our tray.

Whisk the flour into the water so that the ice has a less watery consistency. Pour the flour water 4 blocks at a time into the ice tray then into another bowl.

Do this 4 times into 4 bowls for 4 colors. Add your food coloring to these bowls. I have about 4 drops of color in each bowl.

Now pour the color flour water into the ice mold so that you have 4 ice blocks of each color.

Put your popsicle sticks into the color water. I first put the ice tray in the deep freeze before adding the sticks so that I could balance the popsicle sticks without having them go all over the place when I moved the tray.

Depending on your freezer, I made these in the morning and they were ready by afternoon to play with.

TIPS:

• Twist the ice tray to loosen the ice blocks and make it easier to remove them for painting.
• Take the color ice out of the freezer 5 minutes before the activity so that it can melt a bit before use.
• Use a tray for your paper to minimize mess.

The children loved ice painting

Let the fun begin! This is a great “let the kids do their thing” activity. I love to sit back and see what they come up with.

Round and around testing the color ice and how it makes markings.

My sweet older preschooler loves to draw me flowers so this was his first creation.

The ice holds up for awhile too! We have currently done this activity 3 times already with the SAME ice cube paint!!

Just pop them back into the freezer.

I would love to try make colors of the rainbow for our next ice painting activity. I think it would look gorgeous.

Extra learning ideas:  These ice blocks would also do great to write with and form letters or numbers. You could also do shapes in various colors. The possibilities for learning are endless!

Ice painting is super fun!

Try these fun ICE themed activities from the Early Childhood Education Team:

• What Makes Ice Melt Faster? by The Educators’ Spin On It
• Ice Slide Segmenting Activity by Growing Book by Book
• Ice Alphabet Letters by Still Playing School
• Name Ice Melting Science and Art Experiment by Fun-A-Day
• Slippery Ice Customizable Name Game by Life Over C’s
• Sight Word Ice Excavation by Mom Inspired Life
• Magic Sticky Ice-Simple Temperature  Experiment by Capri + 3
• Exploring Ice After a Storm by Tiny Tots Adventures