*1st published on fathersofmultiples.com
Science can be a lot of fun. And, what better way to spark a lifelong love of science, and curiosity in general, than by getting your kids involved in some fun, exciting science experiments. You’ll be doing something educational but creating family memories along the way. We're celebrating Stem Discovery Week (April 23 - 29) by sharing these awesome experiments that you can do with things around the house!
So, turn your kids into mad scientists by doing these cool experiments and lead them to that lifelong love of science.
1. Color Explosion (Milk + Soap experiment)
Ingredients: a. Whole Milk b. Food Coloring c. Dish Soap
What happens when you dip a q-tip covered in dish detergent into regular milk? The fat in the milk literally moves away from the soap. Add food coloring to make the effect more visible and cool.
2. Lemon Volcano
Ingredients: a. Dish soap b. Baking Soda c. Lemon
This experiment creates a chemical reaction between the baking soda and the lemon juice. Cut the top 3rd off the lemon. Use a spoon to smash the insides of the remaining 2/3 of the lemon, keeping all the juice inside the skin. Really get it juicy. Pour some dish soap into the lemon. Add some food coloring to make the chemical reaction prettier and more fun. Finally, pour some baking soda into the lemon and stir your mixture up a bit. As the baking soda interacts with the lemon juice, the “eruption” begins.
3. Volcano or Exploding Lunch Bag
Ingredients: a. Vinegar b. Baking Soda c. Red food coloring if doing the volcano version
When you add baking soda to vinegar, you get a great reaction. It fizzes, foams, and grows. If you use this in a homemade volcano, and add some red food coloring to the mixture, you get instant "lava". The growing foam floods out over the top of the volcano, and looks really cool. No volcano? Just put vinegar into a sandwich bag…then add the baking soda to the bag. IF you can get the bag sealed fast enough the growing foam and fizz quickly fills the available space within the bag and pops the bag. You have to be quick though. As I was trying to get the bag closed, the mixture already began spewing out. But there’s enough of a reaction that some can spew and, if you get the bag closed after all, the bag will still pop!
4. Robot Hand
Ingredients: a. Cardboard b. Straws c. String
This was a long process for us. Cut your 3-fingered plus thumb robot hand out of cardboard. Leave some length of cardboard beyond the hand for your arm to fit onto. Bend your “fingers” into 3 sections to mimic finger sections. Add a cardboard “sleeve” to put your arm through and another to put your fingers through. Glue these sleeves to your cardboard arm/hand. Then, cut small sections of straw and glue them to the finger sections. Last, tie strings to the straw sections in the end of each finger and thumb. Run the other end of each string through the straw sections per finger. Make sure your string is long enough to reach the fingers sleeve and put a loop into each.
Now, you can put your arm through the arm sleeve and fingers into the finger sleeve, stick a finger into each string loop and pull. Each string independently operates the cardboard finger it is attached to. You can use your cardboard hand to lift relatively light objects.
5. Tornado in a Jar
Ingredients: a. Jar b. Water c. Dish Soap d. Food Coloring
Fill a jar up to about 1 or 2 inches from the top. Squeeze quite a bit of dish soap in to it. Add only 2 drops of food coloring so that the water doesn’t get too dark to see the tornado. Tighten the lid onto the jar and swirl. You’ll see a tornado funnel take form inside your jar! One of my favorite experiments.
6. Color Layering Experiment
Ingredients: a. Honey b. Corn Syrup c. Dish Soap d. Water e. Vegetable Oil f. Rubbing Alcohol g. Baster h. Food Coloring
Gently get each layer into a bottle so that you don’t risk mixing them all. Follow the order above (a-f) starting with honey. You can use a baster or just pour them into the bottle carefully. This is a density experiment, so each level should mostly keep separated from the level above and below it, since they’re different densities. You can also help make the separations pop by adding in food coloring so that you can really differentiate the layers.
7. Homemade Saline Slime (Not Edible)
Ingredients: a. Glue b. Water c. Baking Soda d. Food Coloring e. Saline Solution
We used one of the recipes for homemade saline slime found here, but, we struggled a bit. The recipe calls for ½ cup of glue + ½ cup of water, ½ tsp of baking soda, 1 Tbsp of saline solution, and some food coloring. Ok…following that exactly, we got green soup. So, in our 2nd batch (which was also soupy), we kept adding glue and baking soda until it thickened up. Slime ready. But, the 1st still soupy batch? Why not have fun with it too? We decided to go full-on “Nickelodeon’s You Can't Do That On Television” and had a slime fight. (Outside of course.)
8. Corn Starch and Water
Ingredients: a. Corn Starch b. Water c. Food Coloring (optional)
This is a cool project that will help teach your kids about solids and liquids…mostly because the resulting product defies definition as one or the other. Mix corn starch and water, in roughly equal parts. Stir it up. It will look like a liquid. However, if you push down quickly into it…it’s a solid! Punch it, and it will hurt! Pick it up, and it breaks from the rest of it…but very quickly melts in your hand and drips back into its bowl. One of the experiments the kids will talk about for weeks!
9. Static Motion
Ingredients: a. Balloon b. Empty Soda Can c. Kids’ Hair
This is perhaps the simplest experiment on this list. All you have to do is rub an inflated balloon on your kid’s hair to give it a reserve of static electricity. Next, lay an empty soda can on an uncarpeted floor and move the balloon close to the can. The static electricity will attract the can. The closer you get the balloon to the can, the more the can will move towards the balloon. If you steadily move the balloon away from the can (yet keeping it close enough for the static electricity to affect the can), the can basically chases the balloon!
10. CD Hovercraft
Ingredients: a. CD b. Soda Bottle Cap c. Glue d. Balloon
First, put a hole in the center of the bottle cap. Then glue the bottle cap over the center hole of the CD. Inflate the balloon and put it over the bottle cap. As the air leaves the balloon, it pushes through the hole in the cap and out the hole in the CD, lifting the CD off the surface slightly which allows it to hover and move around.
11. Fizz Inflation
Ingredients: a. Balloon b. Baking Soda c. Vinegar
This project takes the combination of vinegar and baking soda in a different direction than the volcano project. Put vinegar into the bottle, then dump baking soda in. Quickly cover the mouth of the bottle with your balloon, and the reaction of the baking soda and vinegar creates fizz that will inflate the balloon.
12. Skittles Color Wheel
Ingredients: a. Skittles b. Water c. Plate
One of the most colorful experiments in our list. The hardest part of this project will be setting up your Skittles! You have to put them around the inside of your plate, creating a full circle. It may take you a few attempts to get your full circle in place as shown below. Then GENTLY pour water in the center of the plate until the water encompasses your Skittle circle. Now, sit back and watch as the colors bleed off the Skittles towards the center of the plate. If you have different colors of Skittles placed around the circle, you’ll see a rainbow of colors in your color wheel. But, it’ll be watered down…so after the experiment, you won’t want to taste that rainbow…
13. Foam Fountain (aka Elephant Toothpaste)
Ingredients: a. Big bottle b. Hydrogen peroxide c. Packet of dry yeast d. Water e. Dish soap f. Food coloring g. Small cup
For this experiment…get ready to make a mess. It’s fun and the kids will love it, but it’s probably better to do it outside where the mess won’t matter. In your bottle, combine the dish soap (a big squeeze), food coloring (few drops), and hydrogen peroxide (1 cup). In the small cup, combine a pack of dry yeast with about three tablespoons of warm water. Carefully, pour your yeast mixture into the bottle with your first mixture. As the yeast begins to interact with the other ingredients, foam will grow and ooze out of your bottle and truly look like giant toothpaste.
14. Soda Geyser
Ingredients: a. Mentos b. Soda
Add this to the list of simple experiments, but exciting. Kids won’t be able to help loving the reaction when the Mentos hit the soda. Roll roughly 13 Mentos into a piece of paper, forming a tube. Cover the top of your soda bottle with a piece of paper and place your tube just over the mouth of the bottle. Quickly remove the covering piece of paper from the bottle, and the 13 Mentos will drop quickly from your paper roll into the soda. Almost immediately, you’ll have a soda explosion shooting straight up into the air. So, move while you can!
15. Lava Lamp
Ingredients: a. Big Bottle (1 liter) b. Water c. Vegetable oil d. Alka seltzer e. Food coloring
Fill a small bottle (roughly a 1 liter bottle) ¾ of the way full with vegetable oil. Fill the rest of it up to the beginning of the bottle neck with water. Drop in 10 or so drops of food coloring. Then break up a couple of Alka-Seltzers and drop them into the bottle. Cap it off and you’ll have a lava lamp that you can turn upside down and back again to watch your food color bubbles float through as “lava”.
16. Balloon Rocket
Ingredients: a. Kite String b. Straw c. Balloon d. Tape
This project helps teach wind power and momentum both. Tie a string to 2 items, stretching the string across a room. Make sure one end of the string has been sent through a drinking straw before tying it. Blow up a balloon…but don’t tie it. Tape your balloon to the straw and let go. The air exiting the balloon will shoot your balloon/straw combo down the line to the other end of the string!
17. Sound Amplification
Ingredients: a. Cell phone b. Paper Towel Roll c. 2 Red Cups
This experiment shows how sound amplification works. Cut a hole in the side of each of your red cups large enough to squeeze your paper towel roll into. Then, in the center of the paper towel roll, cut a hole just big enough for your phone to fit into. Next, play your favorite song. You’ll hear it blare out of your makeshift red cup speakers!
18. Smoke in a Water Bottle
Ingredients: a. Empty Water Bottle
All you need for this project is an empty water bottle that still has its lid. Take the bottle and twist it at its center, over and over. As the pressure mounts, keep twisting until you can’t twist the bottle anymore. Next release your twist, and when the bottle untwists, you’ll see “smoke” in the bottle and, if you open the lid, you can watch it float out.
19. Soda Can Implosion!
Ingredients: a. Empty soda cans b. Ice Water c. Stove
This is a cool science project that shows how air pressure works. Boil some empty soda cans. Have a big bowl of ice filled water just beside your boiling cans. Using tongs, grab a heated can and put it into the ice bowl with the opening aimed down. You’ll immediately see the can self-crush!! Why?
The boiling water enters the can as evaporated vapor (gas). When you drop it into the cold water, the gas condenses and only makes a couple drops of water. BUT, that means the can has no inner air pressure. The outside air pressure pushes on the can, collapsing it! (Of course, make sure an adult handles the hot parts of this project!)
20. Invisible Ink
Ingredients: a. Lemon Juice b. Candle c. Paper
This is a very fun project for the kids to jump in on. Use anything you can get lemon juice onto the end of - to use as a writing utensil. We broke the ends off of a couple of colored pencils, stabbed those pencils into our lemon like dipping a pen into an inkwell. Our boys wrote the secret, invisible messages onto the paper, and we used a candle flame to hover under the paper heating it up. Pretty quickly, the message appears! Be careful, though, as you “cook the paper,” you can accidentally burn part of your message…and the secret will be forever lost!
Naturally, my boys took this as an opportunity to write “Daddy is a poopy head” which they think is just hilarious.
These experiments are fun!
As you’re getting slimed and having a blast with “magic potions,” you’ll notice they are also educational. Your kids won’t even know they’re “learning,” but they will be.
Each experiment helps show fundimental concepts of science. Getting your children excited about these now will pave the road for their scientific curiosity throughout their lives.