Messy Play Monday - A Little Science Experimentation

I wanted to share some photos and info from a recent messy play \ science activity we did in Nursery. For children in the Early Years science is heavily focused on activities which encourage children to observe, ask questions and speculate, and which inspire their inbuilt sense of wonder!

This can be outside looking at the world around them, noticing patterns, changes and the features of objects. It can be exploring the forces that act on objects for example noticing that the cars roll quicker and further down a steep ramp or, as in this case, it can be exploring different materials and what happens when you combine them.

Before the children arrived we set up a selection of bowls and containers each with some bicarbonate of soda mixed with something else. The pale orange bowl at the top of the picture has jelly crystals mixed with the bicarbonate of soda, the green one is mixed with shaving foam, the dark blue, yellow and red are food colouring and the pale blue one is hair gel.

The children used pipettes to drop vinegar into the different bicarbonate of soda mixtures. These photos show both the chemical reaction and the reaction of the children as they mixed the two. The young man in the blue apron was particularly fascinated by it all and we developed the activity further talking about why it fizzed when the liquid was added. He worked out that it wasn't water because it smelled different and once he knew it was vinegar he wanted to know why we were using vinegar. This led to a brilliant opportunity to support him in devising his own experiment and with support he came up with the idea to try adding water to see if that made bubbles and fizzing too! Of course it didn't and he said "it doesn't work, can I have the vinegar again please!"

 The activity was great for encouraging the children to talk to each other about what they were doing and what was happening. I was also pleased to see that even those who aren't naturally drawn to messy play were stopping by to peep over the shoulders of those who were and having a good look!

 
 By the end we had a vibrant mass of colourful powder and liquid left over and tipped it all into the tray. A lovely additional bonus of this activity was all the interesting colours that were made as the different mixtures combined. A fantastic moment where children were crowding round and noticing that where the yellow and blue mixtures combined we were left with amazing shades of green!