Making the best use of Sick Time - Soap Clouds!

Good Morning!  Thanks for stopping by today.

Well, if you've been following the blog for the past few months, it's no surprise to you that we've had some serious ickiness going on around here during the winter months!  Being sick is no fun for anyone, but especially for an active, smart and daring little guy!  We did our best to have fun through fevers, wheezing, Dr. visits, snot snot and more snot... so here's one of our fun activities/experiments for sickies, rainy days or curious minds!

Soap Clouds!

Can you believe that the voluminous white cloud in our roasting pan is soap?  /And it never seemed to really dissipate, unless you crumble it up into little pieces, but still... it's pretty indestructible as far as clouds go.

Supplies:
Ivory Soap
Microwave
Paper Towel/wax paper or a paper plate
Tools/Colors/Toys to manipulate your soap cloud with

Here's what you do:

- Unwrap your ivory soap bar and place on a paper towel, wax paper or paper plate in the microwave.

- Microwave on HIGH for a few minutes.  You'll start to see the soap grow and grow and grow!  I ended up stopping the microwave around the 1 minute mark when it seemed the cloud wasn't growing more.

- Take the cloud out and start playing with it!  We used different kitchen utensils, food coloring, water, spray bottle and more to see "What would happen if..."

 

Food Coloring on the cloud...

 

 

We liked watching the coloring spread on the soap, but it didn't spread as much as we thought it would. 

Food Coloring was the main variable for our experiment - I'm not sure if it was the pretty coloring or the mere fact that Adam got to use something he doesn't normally get to play with, but it was the variable of choice!

This final photo is an upclose photo after we sprayed the cloud with water, then ended up pouring water all over it like a waterfall.  The cloud mostly stayed in its original fluffy condition.

We left the cloud over night to see what it would look like in the morning... it didn't really change.  I have no idea why Ivory soap reacts like this, we did try Dove soap as well and it didn't blow up like a cloud, I'm sure there's a very interesting science lesson here somewhere but we were focused more on "hypothesizing" part of the experiment.  Hearing a 4-5 year old try to say "I hypothesize" was the best part for me... that and the house smelling so fresh and clean for a few days! 

That's it!  And for those who do not like to waste, if you don't put food coloring, corn syrup, and other variables all over your soap cloud, you can still use it in baths/showers!

That's it for us today!  Have a good one!
Andrea