Homemade Bubbles

Masha' Allah, now that the weather is consistently warm enough in the morning for Baby Professor to be outside, we have gotten back to some of our more Reggio inspired activities. First up was homemade bubbles. I saw a link on Pintrest, which I will include at the end of this post, that gave a recipe for bubbles, and instructions on how to make your own bubble wands out of drinking straws. The activity touted a 'myraid of bubbles' and it sounded really fun, but now I know why there were no pictures.

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Ingredients

1 cup water

1/3 cup Dawn dish soap

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

All the years I've been involved in Early Childhood, the go to dish soap for homemade bubble making has always been Lemon Joy. I had Dawn, the recipe called for Dawn, so we went with that. I will go with Joy in the future, it's much better for bubbles. The recipe also called for corn syrup over glycerin. I think that was an ok substitute.

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Getting Started

Bubble Wands

I wanted the Professors to do this activity from start to finish themselves, with supervision of course. We started off the activity making the bubble wands

The bubble wands are seven straws thick and taped at both ends. I made up a quick tray, and with Grammy's help the Professors chose their own colors, and made their own wands

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Bubble Liquid

There were three steps in making the bubble liquid, which Masha' Allah, worked out perfectly for each Professor to do one step, again with Grammy's assistance. 

Adding the water

I accidentally deleted the picture of adding the water to the pan.

Adding the Dawn

Adding the Corn Syrup

Dipping the Bubble Wands

Unfortunately, despite our best, and repeated efforts, we didn't get much more than this in bubble action

The bubbles came out in clumps, and usually between bursts of empty air. 

If you really look, you can see a few good ones in these two pictures

 I thought the liquid might be to thin in the pan, so I moved it to one of the measuring cups for more density. 

Didn't do much but make a huge mess

Shortly before this, Professor #2 asked if he could ' ride my bike now' and trotted off to ride his big wheel, with most of the other Professors in tow. The other two guys came back off and on to see if there had been any improvement, there wasn't. Baby Professor was going bonkers in the high chair, so we wrapped up. 

I left  the activity set up for the older kids, while I got BP inside. 

Professor #1 and #3 came back to it off and on, and surprisingly, Professor #1 was very upset when I cleaned up, so I guess it wasn't a total fail. 

This is something I've been really wanting to do with the Professors, so insha' Allah, I'll be researching some other homemade bubble activities, and buying some Lemon Joy ; ), and we'll keep trying. 

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Links

As promised here are the links to the bubble recipe. 

This one is to my Pintrest Board. The pin should be in about the second row, and you can also check out some of the other activities we want to try! Insha' Allah.

http://pinterest.com/msmomina/ideas-lessons-activities/

This is a direct link to the recipe

http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/tiny-bubbles-668489/