Salt Painting Ice Sculptures

Salt Painting Ice Sculptures

We were inspired by the Artful Parent to try out this fun science experiment: watching how salt melts ice. Not only is this a great learning project, but it's amazingly beautiful to watch!

3 - 9
Est. Time:
1-2 hours

How we did it:

Materials List

  1. milk carton
  2. water
  3. kosher salt
  4. food coloring
  5. pan
  1. Fill an empty milk carton with water and then freeze the water. 

    Place the ice block on a baking pan. 

  2. Have the children sprinkle salt on top of the block. We did this activity twice...first, with table salt, and then again with kosher salt. (In the end, we decided that kosher salt worked the best).

  3. Have the kids add drops of food coloring onto the salt.

  4. You can see the colors starting to seep inside the block of ice.

  5. On the right side of this block of ice, my daughter poured a cup full of table salt. It didn't really melt the ice as nice as the kosher salt.

  6. The kids oohed and aahed as the the salt melted crevasses into the ice.

  7. We live in a place where it doesn't snow. However if you do live where it snows, this is a great activity to teach the kids why salt is spread on snowy/icy roads. (Salt basically lowers the freezing/melting point of water.)

  8. My daughter had fun touching the cold ice. She is really focused, but later she was laughing up a storm because I caught her sticking her fingers into her mouth so she could taste the salt!