Frozen Vinegar Rainbow Fish

We are very excited to be taking part in our first ever Virtual Book Club For Kids! Each month a different author is chosen and you devise a craft, recipe or activity around a book or books from the author.

This month’s author is Marcus Pfister. His books – particularly The Rainbow Fish series – have always been a firm favourite within my classes and over the years I have completed many activities around the different stories.

You can tell my husband and I are both teachers. The only copies of The Rainbow Fish series we have are Big Books! Not easy for a 22 month old to handle but Adam perseveres!

After being inspired by Toddler Approved and Inspiration Laboratories I decided to try out the frozen vinegar Rainbow Fish.

I poured vinegar into the fish shaped ice cube tray and put them into the freezer. Once the vinegar was partly frozen I added food colouring. This is where I discovered how little food colouring I had so I experimented with adding a little paint to the fish. The trays went back into the freezer.

Unfortunately I had set up the activity some time ago but for various reasons we have been unable to try it out. This has meant we have had the vinegar fish at the bottom of our freezer for several days. Not a particularly nice smell to open your freezer to! It also meant there was some frost damage to the fish so they weren’t as clear as I was expecting.

Just after I took the frozen fish out of the freezer the telephone rang. I completely forgot about the fish during the call and returned to find some of them had melted! Strangely the fish where I used paint didn’t melt as quickly so I was able to salvage four fish.

I made a sea bed of bicarbonate of soda and placed the frozen vinegar fish on top. Knowing that Adam wouldn’t touch the fish or the bicarbonate of soda, I gave him a variety of utensils to move the fish around.

At first there was no reaction so I dipped the fish in water. This sped up the reaction and we got a lot of bubbles. Adam just kept looking at it in confusion. Why were these fish suddenly creating bubbles?

I poured in more vinegar to create a bigger reaction whilst Adam mixed the fish around in the bicarbonate of soda until they dissolved and we were just left with the paint.

I am looking forward to doing this activity when Adam is a little older so we can talk about his thoughts, predictions and conclusions as to why those fish were bubbling. Next time I won’t be answering any phone calls either!