Art & Science Collide: Mad Scientist Experiments

 I like to do science experiments with the girls in the summer and even though we created baking soda volcanoes the previous summer, I came across several posts that inspired me to do a Mad Scientist play experience with the kids. You can see where our inspiration came from in these posts from Growing a Jeweled Rose, and this post and this post from Play at Home Mom.

Here are all of the supplies I gathered:

--vegetable oil

--vinegar

--baking soda

--alkaseltzer tablets

--liquid watercolors

--bubbles

--pipe droppers

--turkey baster

--straws

--measuring cup

We started off with a bin on top of our light table and added some bubbles and liquid watercolor. The kids used straws to blow big bubbles in the solution. We also watched to see how the liquid watercolor moved in the container. We also experimented with smaller straws and bigger straws to see if the bubbles were different sizes.

I cleaned out the bubble solution and added some water. We added vegetable oil and alkaseltzer tablets to watch the liquid watercolor bubble up and make lava lamp type bubbles.

After that, we started making mini baking soda volcanoes in clear plastic glasses. They just kept adding baking soda, vinegar and watercolors over and over again.

Here is a time lapse series of images to see what happens when you pour the vinegar into the baking soda. It worked great because the bin was large enough, the girls could have their own corner and do their own experimenting.

After awhile we picked the cups up to see what they looked like on the bottom:

We didn't realize all that baking soda was still in the bottom so we mixed it up and poured more vinegar in until it was all gone.

I think they could have played with all of this for quite some time. They really had a blast with this activity. And the light table really added to the sensory experience of it all. Highly recommend this!!