Our family is slowly reading through the Little House series, and our 5 year old is particularly enraptured by the in-depth descriptions of the labor-intensive day to day activities of the Ingalls and Wilder families.
In Farmer Boy (Amazon Affiliate link – thanks in advance for supporting me with your purchases), there is a chapter that details the process of harvesting ice blocks from the frozen river (including a great joke that Aidan loves to use now about a two-handed saw) and storing them ALL YEAR in the ice house.
I love learning things with my littles! I had no idea that ice houses were effective for insulating ice all year long so that they could keep food fresh, make ice cream, etc. even in warm weather!
In the book, they used sawdust to surround each block stacked floor-ceiling in the specially-constructed ice house building. That got us talking about other things that might keep ice cold without a freezer, and voila! An experiment was born!
Using this great Scientific Method printable, we made a plan to use four different materials and four ice cubes to test for the best insulator.
I chose newspaper and salt and let the kiddos choose two more materials. They chose facial tissue and rice.
We gathered containers, decided whether or not to shred the paper items, and made a hypothesis.
Aidan’s hypothesis was that the SALT would keep the ice cold the longest.
We buried each ice cube in our materials, covering them the best we could. If I’d known we were going to do this project, I would have tracked down larger containers since our ice cubes are pretty large and our containers were barely adequate.
We decided to observe and record the changes in the ice every thirty minutes for two hours.
After just 30 minutes, the ice cube in the salt was already half melted – which of course I knew would happen – and Aidan was quite sad that his hypothesis was disproved so quickly. It was a great opportunity to talk to him about seeing things through and enjoying the discovery process. We also talked about why salt melts ice, of course.
My personal hypothesis was that newspaper would be the best insulator, but after two hours, tissue was the clear winner. It would be fun to reproduce the experiment some time to see if packing the newspaper and tissue more tightly would have made their results more similar.
This was a great activity for both my 5 and 3 year olds. They’ve always loved playing with ice. And I love that it’s practically free and doesn’t contribute to clutter! My kind of “toy!”
If you decide to try a variation of this project, I want to know your results!! And I’d love to know if you’ve done any other “Little House” activities that you loved! These books just lend to so much discussion and potential learning!
Do you homeschool? I want to know why!
Linked up to Homeschool Linky Party, Frugal Homeschool Friday, Hearts for Home, and From House to Home.
The post Almonzo’s Ice House ~ A Farmer Boy Activity appeared first on Raising the Barrs.
