161) Ice Cube Sailboats

Our first week of Summer vacation has been filled with lots of hot summer like days. The girls have spent much of the time playing in the yard with the hose and sprinkler. To add a little something fun to all their water play we made ice cube sailboats. This is by no means a long term project. In fact in the hot afternoon heat the sailboats only stuck around for about 10 minutes but it was a good diversion when the girls started bickering. Not to mention the colored water left behind, which the girls loved playing with long after the sail boats were gone.

The idea for the Sailboats came from a blog called El Hada De Papel, it is one of my favorite blogs, filled with tons of ideas of beautiful things to make with kids.  I used some old baby food trays but you could use any ice cube trays. We then filled the trays with water and added a few drops food coloring to each tray. Fortunately El Hada De Papel showed this awesome trick, using clothes pins to hold the toothpicks in the ice cube trays, which made making these little boats very easy. After the ice cube trays were ready we stuck them in the freezer. When we were ready to sail our sailboats I took them out of the freezer and the Bee helped me wrap a thin post-it paper around each toothpick. The toothpicks made it easier to take the boats out of the tray and we set them to sail in a large plastic container of water.

We made a few trays so played with a few boats each day. Both girls enjoyed playing with the boats but the Bean really loved making them sail, playing until the last boat finally melted. Both girls loved the color left behind by the melting boats and playing with the colored water. They were so easy to make ahead of time and perfect to pull out when we needed a little something else to do, I can see us making them again this summer.