Colour mixing with ice

Welcome to a whole week of ice activities on Science Sparks.

Today we are looking at a combination of fluids freezing and mixing of colours.

What you need:

Different colour juices

Ice cube tray

Freezer

What we did:

We put lots of different fruit juices in an ice cube tray, and left them to freeze.

A few hours later, we removed the ice cube trays and touched the ice cubes very carefully.

Z said they were sticky and S thought they were  too cold.

We then tipped the juice cubes out of the tray and chose different coloured cubes to mix up, talking about what colours we thought we could create when the fruit juice cubes melted.

Z and S are not very patient so we discussed how to speed up the melting process, we decided to crush up the cubes and hold the cups to warm them up a little bit. Soon we had a lovely slushy brown coloured juice drink.

The Science Bit

Why does water freeze?

Water can be a solid, liquid or gas.  In liquid form the water particles can move around freely, so the water takes the shape of the container it is in. When you cool the water down the movement of the particles slow down and the particles become tightly packed together, which means its shape cannot change easily. We will come back to this later on and investigate in more detail.

Why is ice sticky?

Ice feels sticky because when you touch it, the ice immediately freezes the moisture in your skin, which makes the cube feel sticky.

Don’t forget to check out our other ice play ideas here.