This week our family tried a really cool experiment, Fizzy Ice Chalk. It was a lot of fun and is the perfect outside activity in the heat! It is a take on the classic baking soda and vinegar experiment and can be made with a few simple household ingredients.
Materials
• ¼ cup cornstarch
• ¼ cup baking soda
• ½ cup water
• 3-5 drops of color
• Vinegar
• Ice cube tray
• Squeeze bottles, pipettes, or a spray bottle (This is to hold the vinegar. Any container works)
Gather your supplies to make fizzy ice!
Combine baking soda, cornstarch. Mix together. Add ½ cup of water and a few drops of color. We used liquid watercolor but food coloring also works. Mix until combined. This recipe is super flexible and does not need to be exact.
Pour the mixture into ice cube trays and freeze overnight. This was the hardest part for my kids…having to wait for the ice to freeze.
Once the ice was ready we headed outside! This ice is perfect for a hot day. What’s so great about this fizzy ice is that we basically made a chalk paint and froze it into cubes, so as the kids played they had fun painting with the different colors.
When the ice was fresh from the freezer we discovered that it did not color or fizz right away. It was way too frozen. My children had fun building towers with the brightly colored cubes as they waited. It did not take long for the ice to begin to melt. They discovered that as the ice melted it was easier to draw with and the bigger fizz they got when adding the vinegar. They had a lot of fun experimenting with different ways to apply the vinegar. They preferred the squeeze bottles, which gave them the biggest fizz.
Share with us what you discover. Send us pictures to rbieretz@marylandnature.org