Blizzard in a Bottle

This week in Cohort A we did a science experiment activity called "blizzard in a bottle". The idea was to mix water, paint, and baby oil, and then drop in an alka-selzter tablet and watch it make bubbles and "snowflakes". We collected empty plastic bottles during the week to use for this experiment. The reason I chose this activity is because I've noticed that the kids love to watch how different substances react with one another, and they especially enjoy watching them fizz and erupt. My favourite part of sharing science experiments with the kids is watching their reactions and hearing them guess what will happen. During this experiment, one child guessed that "when you add the baby oil, it won't actually mix with the water but it will sit on top", and they were right!

The original experiment only used white paint, to appear more blizzard-like, but I let the kids choose whatever colour they wanted and that lead to some very colourful bottle-blizzards! Once they added the alka-selzter tablets and watched it fizz, they were very curious as to what would happen if they shook the bottle and mixed all the substances together. One child exclaimed; "I want to make it as fizzy as possible and have a really crazy blizzard!" And that's just what they did.

Another child was curious about how the mixture would look when poured out into a cup, and they all agreed that it kind of looked like coloured milk! It was very cool to see the texture of the "blizzard", and how it changed as it was being poured.

The children enjoyed playing with their bottled concoctions for the rest of the afternoon and were very excited that they got to take them home and show their families what they made. We all agreed that next time we try it, we will use more alka-selzter tablets to see just how fizzy we can make it, maybe we can even make it erupt out of the bottle!
Until next time,
​- Katie