big beautiful bubbles
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
We love science and it excites us the way it creeps silently into our days.
We set up a bubble printing activity after the children had so much fun making bubbles in the slime … you know the one; you colour some bubble mixture, the children blow bubbles through a straw, then press a piece of paper over the top to print the bubbles…great activity, loads of fun.
We discovered however that the children weren’t so interested in printing the bubbles as all they really wanted to do was blow them, in fact the bigger the bubbles the better!
So after a while we removed the colour and the paper and provided them with plenty of bubble mixture.
We place small pots of mixture inside ice-cream containers, so the overflow was contained …
…and just let them go for it!
We talked about how filling our lungs with air and blowing through the straw forced the air from our lungs into the bubble mixture which caused the air bubbles to develop, and as air molecules don’t like to be squished together they force their way out, hence the bubbles pop and the air escapes! (similar to our balloon rocket post on October 12th).
The children are very good at understanding that for health reasons each child requires their own straw, so we provided fresh straws in one container and the children discarded the used straws into another to be disinfected and recycled at the invention table.
::: make it irresistible :::
Naturally we wanted to make the activity irresistible to the children, so we included a simple centerpiece of a colourful rainbow puzzle on a piece of coloured paper.
You can see the difference for yourself … in the picture on the left the table looks a little boring while the same table pictured on the right is much more inviting!
