Rainbow Snow!

We just got our very first snow of the winter, but I was loathe to dig out their snowsuits from the packed suitcases waiting by the door for our trip up north tomorrow... so I decided to bring the snow into the kids instead!

Inspired by this post at the Chocolate Muffin Tree about painting snow outside with colored water, I filled an ice cube tray with water, then put a couple drops of food coloring/gels in each.

I went outside and scooped up some fresh snow, careful to get only the cleanest, since I had a feeling it was going to end up being eaten.

I handed the kids paintbrushes at first to drip the color into their bowls, but the little brushes didn't carry much of the colored water and were difficult to control, so I grabbed a couple of used, clean medicine syringes (the kind without needles, obviously!) and let the kids start filling and squirting them into their snow how ever they liked. And they *loved* it all, doing the whole thirty minute activity twice in the same night!

They kept the paint brushes for stirring and poking. I had thought that scooping and packing the snow would be fun, so I brought out spoons and small containers, but as soon as they had spoons they both just set to eating it like ice cream, delighting in the silliness of it all. In fact, after the first round when we had to stop to eat, they drank their colored snow water with dinner.

Anya explored how plain water squirted made a clean tunnel to the bottom of the bowl, then set about making a blue green lake at the bottom, so the snow had "something to float on"

We also tried squirting separate drops of all the colors onto the bottom of a bowl, packing fresh snow down into it, then inverting the bowl and looking at the rainbow patterns that the snow took up (the first photo of the post is from that experiment).

Overall, tons of fun, very little mess, no expense, a little color theory and a little physics as we talked about temperature. Win!