Let's see the water move - sea currents

If you have kids you have probably heard about a cartoon movie called Finding Nemo, about a little clown fish crossing the ocean to find his son Nemo travelling on the fast East Australian current with a bunch of sea turtles. Does it ring a bell? Well, even though this movie is not really considered educational, we both love it and  while watching it we started to talk about the currents.

It wasn't actually the only children movie we have seen that tried to 'educate' the children about the movements of the Ocean by a coincidence we watched a short Czech cartoon the next day (Pane pojdte budeme si hrat) and there was a walrus travelling in the Gulf stream across the Atlantic ocean.

So we started to talk more about them, we looked at the map to try to see where the currents are forming and how far can they reach  and I tried to explain to him what it is that causes the water to move this way.
In the end I realised that he might be still too little to understand this and thought that a visual experiment he can be a part of  might be a better option.

So we decide to look at how the current moves

for this simple but effective experiment you will need:

• large clear plastic or glass container (we used IKEA box but glass baking try or white ceramic one would work too, the larger, the better!
• cold water
• ice
• hot water
• and some food colouring 
• you can add some sea animals for the visual effect

So lets get started

fill up your container with ice cold water (it needs to be very cold for this to work) we added some blue food colouring and Teddy has added his sea animals!

now add some ice to make it even colder brrrrrrr we used small cubes the first time but the next time we did decide to make it even more fun and we put in 'an iceberg' and some of his arctic sea animals (well apart from the poor green turtle but  he just loves how it floats in the current)

Let the ice to cool the water for a bit (Teddy enjoys playing in the water with his sea animals) and boil some hot water.

Carefully colour the hot water with some dark food die, We used red but you can use black or even just darker blue.

then slowly and carefully pour the hot water at one side of the container and watch the current move!

If you'd like to see the books that are about ocean and its animals, please check out are previous post :

What hides beneath...the layers of the ocean 

you can also follow us on Facebook for more fun activities and interesting experiments: 

Mama & son time