Firework in a jar - experiment

We have been spending time with our beloved whales lately and haven't been introducing any new topics but there is always time for some experiment, isn't there?!

Firework in a Jar - Experiment 

This is one of Teddy's favourite and mine too but to be honest for a completely different reason. Whereas Teddy is absolutely fascinated by the slowly spreading 'fireworks' and an occasional 'bomb' as he calls the large drops of colours that get through at a high speed, I like it as it is super fast and easy and I always have the ingredients required at home and so will probably you!

All you need for this experiment is:

• water 
• oil (any oil you have in your cupboard - we either use sunflower or olive oil and I think we have used rapeseed today)
• liquid food colouring (colours of your choice)
• glass jar (can be any jar, glass, see through container you have at home)

this is all so if you have it at home, lets get stuck in, no preparation really needed and all will be ready and executed within 5 minutes!

Get your jar or glass container and fill it up with cold tap water all the way to the top, just leave a little bit of space. 

now put a little bit of oil in different cup/beaker (depends on the size of your jar, we used 1.5 l jar of water and here we have maybe 40ml of oil)

decide which colours you use and put a couple of drop from each one into the oil (the food colouring with dropper will work the best, we don't have those so we used a wooden skewer to drop some in)

now the most important bit...use a fork and mix the colours thoroughly in the oil, the food colouring will not mix up with the oil but it will separate into looooads of tiny droplets and this is what you want!



That's all!!!

now you let your little one pour the oil into the jar of water and wait for the magic to happen!! within few seconds the droplets of the food colouring will find its way to the water layer as they are heavier than the oil and start to fall into the water. Some of them will travel slowly and curling around whereas some large ones might drop the the bottom faster and 'explode' with colours. These are Teddy's favourite 'bombs' and no matter how often we do this experiment he never gets enough!!

if you haven't seen it already there is a video of  the experiment on our Facebook page:
 Mama and Son time

So get stuck in and I'm looking forward to hearing how you got on and how your little ones enjoyed it!