Lava Sensory/Discovery Bottles With A Twist!

We are moving into our ocean study month, to kick it off we have been making ocean themed sensory/discovery bottles. These bottles are a well known, popular craft, yet I have never made any of these before this year. When I started looking into them I quickly discovered there are many different ways to make them, and people are thinking of new ones all the time. We have been testing out several ways to and making up some of our own to see what we like best. So far we have made them using water, baby oil, vegetable oil, rocks, rice, popcorn kernels, beads, pearls, glitter, and much more! My husband likes the rice and rock ones best, whereas the kiddo likes the lave lamp ones best, shown below. However you decide to make yours they are sure to be a huge hit with the little ones! Scroll down, check out our results for our lava lamp we did recently, how we made it, a few tips, and what we added that makes ours a little different, more unique than others you may have seen.

DIY Light Up Lava Lamp

This is such an exciting, fun, and simple science experiment for kids of all ages, and you probably already have everything you need to make a DIY lava lamp at home now. There is a very simple “glitter lamp” version of this project you can do as well using only glitter and baby/vegetable oil, but to make an interesting and safe lava lamp effect like the one shown in the video and photos below you’ll need to add a couple more things.

You’ll need:

A clear jar/bottle

Water

Clear oil baby oil or vegetable oil works well

Alka-Seltzer  

Food coloring (optional)

Glitter (optional)

Water beads (optional) we used a mix of colors and sizes

Before doing any experiment we grab our science note book to practice using the scientific method. The kids write out a few questions. form a hypothesis. and make their predictions! The questions we asked for this experiment are:

Why does the Alka-Seltzer act the way it does when added?

Is the food coloring in the oil or the water?

How can you tell what the food coloring is in?

Is food coloring polar or nonpolar?

To make things even easier on ya’ll, you can find our answers to these questions below!

These DIY lava lamps are incredibly easy to do! Ready? Ok then, let’s be scientist! Add a little water to your bottle (the photos below show a good example of how much water/oil to use) roughly 1/4 the size of the bottle give or take a little. Drop in your water beads (you can find the water beads we used on the Amazon shopping list below or by clicking HERE) if you chose to use any. We let ours expand a but before putting them in but however you decide will work out great! Next, pour the oil in gently, making sure to leave some space at the top of your bottle. Add a small drop of the food coloring, and glitter if you have decided to use them. A lot of people add the glitter and coloring before the oil, but we chose to add it after so we could watch the effect of them slowly dropping through the oil to the water. It’s a very cool thing for the kids to watch! Whenever you and your little ones are ready, break one of the Alka-Seltzer tablets in half and drop it into the bottle to activate the lava lamp. The bigger the piece you use the better effect you’ll get, but be carful it can spill over. I recommend doing that last part in a container/bowl or outside just in case. You can mix the contents of the bottle a little before adding the Alka-Seltzer as we did, or not at all and just let the Alka-Seltzer do it’s thing! Mixing it and then letting it settle is also a pretty cool thing to see for the little ones, and it will help you answer some of the questions above! I hope your lava/glitter lamps are as fun for ya’ll as ours were to us!

If you’re looking for more summer fun ideas CLICK HERE!!

Answers for the questions above:

What’s happening here and why? Water is a polar molecule, while oil is nonpolar. Polar molecules stick to each other, but not to nonpolar molecules. Oil and water don’t mix! The oil is less dense than water, so it floats on top.

Why does the Alka-Seltzer act the way it does when added? When Alka-Seltzer is added to water, the water allows the acid and base powders to react together. The reaction produces carbon dioxide gas released as bubbles, and sodium citrate salt. If you drop some into water only you’ll see it on the bottom of the glass after the reaction.

Is the food coloring in the oil or the water? It’s in the water. It doesn’t mix with the oil, which is why you get the bubble effect of the colored watch floating through the oil!

How can you tell? If you let the bottle settle you’ll see that only the water remains colored!

Is food coloring polar or nonpolar? It’s polar, which is why it mixes with the water!

As some of you know, we school year round, however we do kind of a slow down in the summer months. We lean on our favorite educational apps (you can check them & more out HERE) more since we are on the go more and don’t want the kids to fall behind. We have more half days than full and a lot more free study (letting the kids choose what subjects/activities they’d like to focus on most), and we do A LOT more hands on activities and experiments. Don’t worry, packs will still be sent out, but you’ll also be seeing a lot more of our favorite summer activities and adventures! Hopefully you’ll find something useful and maybe even some new fun things for your summer days among this and the upcoming post!