Ice and Salt - What a chemistry!

Its summer - its hot and also its vacation time. Kids are around the whole day and would like to be engaged too. What else can be more fun than playing with the ice? And how about adding some color to it...Voila!

All you need for this fun activity is water, salt and food coloring. Sounds easy, isnt't it? Just pour water in a container and freeze it. When it is frozen to ice, its activity time!!


My kids poured a few drops of food coloring onto the ice. Then they started sprinkling salt over it. What a colorful picture unfolds, with the salt making the ice to melt and the food coloring showing the path of the salt!

Now, give me your ears! This is not just a fun activity but a learning activity too. Yes, there is something called freezing point depression. Its nothing but lowering the freezing point of a liquid by adding another compound to it. So here the salt added to the water decreases the freezing point of water and the ice begins to melt. This creates craters and tunnels which could be seen nicely with the aid of the food coloring.

The next catch is when the ice melts and becomes water, salt dissolves in it. This increases the freezing point again and the water refreezes. There is another experiment we did with that which I would post later.

Yeah, after this experiment my kids knew why salt is sprinkled on the roads during snow shower.

The boys absolutely loved this activity. Of course after a while the colors couldn't be seen distinctly due to the over enthusiasm!

And finally my younger son who is crazy about Titanic and knows A to Z about it, (well, at least I think so ;-) ) never leaves his Titanic alone. So here he brings to test hitting the iceberg.

And then a life boat too!

This activity was loads of fun for the boys and for me too. What more do I want than if they are engaged and not before the TV!! :)