Discovery Bottles

    Last Friday, and again today, the kids have been helping me make some "Discovery Bottles."   I have gathered some of my favorite ideas from the many that are out there on the web, and so far we have made six fun bottles for the kids to explore and play with.

This one is our "Shaker bottle,"  filled with things like toothpicks, dry pasta, popcorn seeds, and rice.  (Once the bottles were filled, I hot glued the lids on, both on the inside and again around the outside to seal them up tight.)   The kids can shake this one hard and make lots of noise, or slowly tilt it back and forth to make some "rain" sounds.

The one here on the left is our "sink or float" bottle.  It was fun to fill it up and have the kids guess which items would sink and which would float.   Now that it is done, they can shake it up and watch the items separate again and again.

On the right is our "Oil & Water" bottle.  In the picture below, you can see what it looks like when the kids shake it up and try to mix the oil with the water.  After it is shaken, if they let it rest it will all separate out again.  A fun way to talk about density.

Today we added a liquid layers bottle, a sudsy soap bottle, and a glitter in water bottle.  The liquid layers bottle is another fun demonstration of density, as it has many different layers of liquids such as rubbing alcohol, water, dishsoap, cooking oil, and shampoo, which all have different densities so they stay in their own separate layers.

Then there is the sudsy soap bottle, which the kids love to shake up really hard and make lots of bubbles and then watch them dissolve.  The last one for today is the glitter in water bottle, which is just another fun one to shake up and watch what happens, and reminds us of the snow globes we made this winter!   I plan to add a few more bottles throughout the week, such as a marbles in hairgel bottle, and maybe a glitter in glycerine bottle, too.