Summer Activities: Big Bubble Wands & Foam Snakes

I’ve seen these activities all over the internet, but we have never given them a try. What a huge, huge hit these two activities were! The bubble solution was easy to make, I just had to make sure I ordered glycerine ahead of time. I mixed up another batch in under than five minutes when we (quickly) ran out of our first bowlful.

This is the solution we used:

• 1 cup water (The recipe I wrote down actually called for 6 (yes SIX!) cups of water, but we weren’t paying close attention and only added one cup… This is obviously a very forgiving recipe!  I suppose it doesn’t matter how much you put in. It worked fairly well for us, maybe more water would have worked better and certainly the solution would last longer!)
• 1/2 cup blue Dawn dish detergent
• 1/2 cup corn starch
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon Glycerine (I ordered this vegetable glycerine from Amazon to have on hand)

Big Bubbles: 

We used two long craft sticks and some thick, heavy string to make the wand. We tried yarn, but that definitely didn’t work for us.  The trick was having one the strings tied at uneven lengths, as you can see in the picture below.  The string should make a smile when you hold the sticks out horizontal.

This is definitely something we’ll repeat again sometime this summer… maybe when we have friends over.

Foam Snake:

I saw this activity over on Betz White’s website.  It looked like a fun activity to try at the same time we tried out the Big Bubble wands. We just cut off the end of a soda bottle, placed a piece of an old dish towel over the end and attached it with a rubber band. The kids dipped the towel end into the bubble solution and then blew through the small end. ED loved it and big wads of bubbles bounced around the yard. The girls stacked them up to make “sculptures.”

Be sure to check out the free Engineering Adventures unit, “Bubble Bonanza, Engineering Bubble Wands.” This is a free unit offered by the Museum of Science in Boston: Kids will explore how bubbles behave and investigate the properties of different materials as they engineer all kinds of bubble wands.

Be sure to check out the entire Summer Activities Series! We have lots of indoor and outdoor activities to share with you all summer long.

See you next time or at our Homeschool Facebook Page.