Quantcast

Mama Smiles

Parenting, Crafts, Education, and Family Travel

MaryAnne at Mama Smiles Welcome to my blog! I'm MaryAnne, and I write about building a rewarding family life through mindful parenting, hands-on learning, and creative family activities. Learn more.

Winter Fun for Kids: Painting with Icicles

by

Painting with icicles is a delightful winter activity that kids love. Even better, it’s virtually mess-free! If you live somewhere cold enough for this activity, you may also want to try bringing in snow for the kids!

Painting with icicles is a delightful winter activity that kids love. Even better, it's virtually mess-free! #toddleractivities #ece #winterfunforkids #kidsactivities #mamasmiles

Paint with Icicles – Winter fun for Kids

I introduced my kids to this activity back when we lived in Massachusetts, where winters were long and icicles were abundant. We started off using icicles to paint with Kool-Aid, but then I realized that painting on construction paper was equally entertaining to the kids, and virtually mess-free!

painting with an icicle on construction paper

Lily was thrilled to discover that you can “paint” on construction paper with icicles! The paper is fairly porous, so the water shows up right away, then dries so you can paint all over again!

painting with an icicle on construction paper

This was a great distraction from the virus she was battling, and she surprised me by making some pretty neat observations about her icicle:

It was so much fun that we decided to do it again with Johnny when he got home from preschool the next day! Lily showed him what to do:

And Johnny was equally fascinated!

painting with an icicle on construction paper

Emma was very disappointed to discover that she had been left out of icicle painting, so we’ll be repeating this activity the next time we have icicles hanging from our roof!

Do you have any fun icicle activities? We’ve also used icicles to paint with Kool-Aid!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  4. What an imaginative idea! I can’t wait to try this. Now if only we could get Jack Frost to visit our house…

  6. I love your site! The video was adorable! I’ve never had my kids do that before, but I know they’d like to. Hopefully we’ll get some icicles this year.

  11. Fabulous! I love how observant your official cookie taster is, and how clear her speech is as well! :) She is just darling. What a great activity and ideal virus distraction. Hope she’s all better now.

  12. How fun! It reminds me of those boards or mats you can paint with a water “marker.” My kids loved those when they were younger.

  15. Oh, and another comment just to say, I love your new hand-drawn social networking icons!!

  20. due to global warming, we’ll have to put this project off indefinitely ;) Seriously, we’ve had about an inch of snow all winter! Although, I guess we could make icicles in the freezer??
    We often paint with just water on construction paper and then we let the paper dry and reuse it the next day!

    • We haven’t had icicles since! I was thinking we should pull out the paintbrushes and just paint with them – slightly messier but very fun!

  24. Oh my goodness! Look how little they are! It’s amazing how much they’ve grown, that’s a fun thing about old posts being republished, you can see how much the people we’ve watched grow up from afar have grown.

shares