Ice + Salt Eroding Brain Experiment

Listen, guys, I have a confession. I’m a closet Pinterest Mom. I’m not like a regular Pinterest Mom, I’m a cool Pinterest Mom. 

I’ve decided to start sharing some hot-mess-mom-approved kid activities with you in case you also blur the lines between total shit show of a parent and sometimes does cool crap with their offspring.

In the future, I’ll also be sharing with you all the fun Pinterest fails I’ve run across so you don’t find yourself screaming into a pillow on numerous occasions like I have.

For my first hot mess mom kidtivity, I present to you, the Eroding Brain.

The bright colors were what drew me to this pin in the first place. I'm basically a bird. I'm attracted to colorful, shiny things. The fact that it's an easy Science experiment using things you more than likely have around the house and that it requires very minimal set-up were what sold me.

Let's dive into this Ice + Salt Melting Experiment originally posted by The Artful Parent.

Eroding brain?  You bet your ass. Because I can’t do anything like a normal person. You can make this as simple or as fancy as you'd like and I'll show you how.

How to do this shit:

1. Decide how fancy you want to get with this. You could use a mold like I did, you could use some Tupperware, you could hire a professional ice sculptor to chisel you a swan with a chainsaw. I don't care. Go crazy. All you need is a giant ass block of ice. So grab your container, fill it up with water, and stick it in your freezer overnight, while you're at work, whatever works.

TIP: If you want to be an over-achiever, you can boil filtered water before freezing and your ice will come out a lot clearer. Not completely clear, but clearer. You're welcome.

2. Once frozen, remove your ice from the mold or container into a deep container like a casserole dish or larger Tupperware container. You can run hot water over the outside of the mold to help release the ice from the container.

3. Using different cups or containers, mix up your colors with water and food coloring.

4. Sprinkle salt all over the ice.

5. Drop colored water over the ice using your dropper. Try using different colors in different areas where the salt has created tunnels inside of the ice.

6. Repeat steps 4 & 5 as often as you'd like. My son was at it for quite some time. You could be all educational if you'd like and look up the science behind how and why salt melts ice, but some of us ain't got time for that.

Here's how ours turned out

This kidtivity gets my special kid’s “stamp of approval” because it actually held my child's attention for much longer than 5 whole minutes before he ran off to binge on screens or run around the house doing parkour with brief breaks to touch his junk.


It also gets my personal stamp of approval because it was pretty fun to get in on the action with him.

So, try this thing out and let me know how you fared in the comments below!