If you have any Frozen fans at home, this Frozen Fractals Ice Sculptures activity will be a delight. It’s simple to prepare, and kids who love Anna and Elsa will be thrilled. It’s also a great hands-on science activity: colouring water, freezing it into ice, and then building with those pieces is engaging for little engineers.
For your Frozen Fractals Ice Sculptures Activity, you’ll need:
- Ice-cube trays
- Larger plastic containers or moulds
- Liquid food colouring, gel colours, or liquid watercolours
- Glitter
- Paint brushes
- A bowl of water
A few days in advance:
Prepare several batches of coloured, glittery ice cubes and ice blocks. An easy method is to mix a jug of water, tint it with food colouring, stir in glitter, and pour into trays. Freeze one colour at a time: refill the jug, choose a new tint, and repeat until you have a variety of colours.
Place your filled ice-cube trays on a baking sheet or cookie sheet before freezing. The tray keeps the moulds level and catches spills. If you’d like long, slim cubes for water bottles, you can use specialised trays designed for that shape.
On the day of the activity:
Remove your coloured ice from the trays and place the pieces in a bowl. Provide a second bowl filled with cold water and set out paint brushes. I like to set this up outdoors in the shade on a low table so kids can move freely and feel safe handling the ice.
Explain that you’ll try to build an ice sculpture. Children can wet their brushes and use them to press coloured cubes onto a larger block of ice. In cold weather the wet pieces will fuse together quickly as the water refreezes, making an excellent, simple science lesson about freezing and melting.
On hot days it’s trickier, since the ice melts faster and the pieces don’t stick as readily. That’s part of the learning experience: kids observe how temperature affects the materials.
Very young children often prefer to scoop, pour and mix the ice cubes in the bowl of water rather than building. That’s perfectly fine — sensory play is valuable at any age. Older children may enjoy constructing towers and patterns, and adults can join in to create more elaborate frozen fractal structures.
The finished sculptures are bright and sparkly, and they make for memorable sensory and STEM play. You’ll likely have plenty of leftover glittery ice cubes to use in other activities or to repeat the play on another day.
More Ice Activities For Kids:
Melting Anna’s Frozen Hands
Painting with Coloured Ice
Frozen Fractal Soup Activity
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