Writing Secret Messages

I meant to talk about this a couple of days ago right after the lemon soda post, but life’s been full and fun and I didn’t get around to it.  This is another great activity to do with ingredients I’m sure you have in your kitchen.

We did this a while ago, but if the weather’s hot, your kids might enjoy being spies for the afternoon!

We used two different methods to write our secret messages:

  1. We mixed equal parts baking soda and water.
  2. We used straight lemon juice.
We wanted to see which method would work better so we wrote some messages with the baking soda and wrote others with the lemon juice.

Then we used Q-tips to write our secret messages on paper.

We had read that you can use a hair dryer to make the messages appear, but this didn’t work well for us.

Instead, we put the messages in our oven on broil for 2 minutes–closely watched! Do not walk away!

We found that the messages written with baking soda came out really dark, but the lemon juice method worked well as well. At the time we did this, we had just read the Emperor’s New Clothes, thus all the pictures of kings in our photo below!

Hope you have fun with your kids!

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