Rainbow Ice Painting: Sensory and Art Activity!

Rainbow ice painting is a fun, engaging, and vibrant activity. And the best part: it’s quick and easy to prepare! You can also recruit your little ones to prepare the materials in advance and deepen the experience! This is a great activity to do when it’s hot out, and can be used outdoors on the pavement, or indoors on paper.

All you need are three simple materials:

ice cube tray
food coloring
water

Optional materials:

popsicle sticks
scissors
cling wrap

Simply

add in 3-4 drops of food coloring to each cube
pour in water three-fourths of the way full (you don’t want to colors to spill and get muddled)
freeze overnight

For this activity, I added each of the colors of the rainbow, but you can add any color you’d like. You can even expand this activity to become a color-mixing activity and mix your own colors using the food coloring with your little ones.

Optionally, you can cut popsicle sticks in half and place them in each ice cube to create a handle, which I did to half of the colors. I used cling wrap to keep the sticks in place.

Once the ice cubes are frozen, you can take them out and use them to paint! As the water melts, the food coloring acts as paint and creates vibrant colors on your paper or whatever surface you choose. Look at how beautiful these colors turned out!

This works as a sensory activity where children can feel the coldness of the ice and work with their hands. They can also see the cause-and-effect of the ice melting and colors mixing together.

Additional materials to enhance the activity:

tongs
pipettes
water
paint brushes

With just three simple ingredients, you can create endless works of art. Happy painting!

This activity corresponds with the following DRDP measures:

COG 8: Cause-and-Effect

Child demonstrates an increasing ability to observe, anticipate, and reason about the relationship between cause and effect

PD-HLTH 4: Fine Motor Manipulative Skills

Child demonstrates increasing precision, strength, coordination, and efficiency when using muscles of the hand for play and functional tasks

VPA 1: Visual Art

Child engages, develops skills, and expresses self with increasing creativity, complexity, and depth through two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual art

ATL-REG 1: Attention Maintenance

Child develops the capacity to pay attention to people, things, or the environment when interacting with others or exploring play materials