Glowing Ice Cubes

I recently discovered black light play through this awesome blog Growing A Jeweled Rose.  She has a whole section on playing with a black light Black Light Play :) I honestly can not rave about this blog enough, they do lots of awesome sensory baths and play and lots of messy play :)

Inspired by her black light play, I really wanted to try some with Sammie and Maddie. I purchased a couple of these UV flashlights for us to use. Warning, these flashlights are extremely bright and hurt your eyes to look directly at. I am currently searching for a better black light to use.

I made up a bunch of glow water (water that reacts to the black lights). To make the glow water, you need some highlighters (yellow works the best), open them up and take out the pad that's inside. Soak the pad in some regular water. I think I used maybe 2 cups of water for each colour. I tried both the big highlighters and the pen sized highlighters. The big ones worked better.

I made up yellow, blue, purple, green, pink and orange. The blue and purple didn't react to the black light at all. The pink and orange react slightly. But the green and yellow, wow they glow a lot! :)

Our glow water under normal lights

And under the black light :)

Once the glow water is made, you can take this water and dilute it a lot and it will still glow.

I took some of each colour that reacted and diluted it a bit more and filled a couple ice cube trays and some baby food containers. Then I froze them all.

I also found out by reading on Growing A Jeweled Rose. that tonic water reacts under the black lights as well. So I bought a bottle of it and froze some of it as well. :)

While they were freezing, I tried to find a room in the house that we could play with them in. The only room that would work, (dark enough and safe to play with water in) was the upstairs bathroom. I had to pin some towels over the window to block out some light but it worked.

I put a shallow tote on the floor, dumped all the frozen glowing things into it, and set the UV flashlights around the tote. I tried to point the lights towards the ice, but without shining into any one's eyes. It worked okay, but I really think we need a better black light.

Here is our frozen glowing cubes :) The yellow and green cubes react the most :)



Sammie was completely amazed with it :) She loved playing with the ice and seeing it glow too :)
She spent the most time trying to build a castle with them and just moving them around the tote.

They glowed much better with the UV flashlight pointed directly at them.

The green cube that glowed the most :)

This was a lot of fun :) We just loved seeing them glow in the dark and checking out what else glowed under the black light ;)

We will be posting lots of other activities that we are doing with the black lights, like slime and goop :)

If you like this post, please join us over at our Facebook page to see lots more pictures of our fun with the black light :)