Unplugged Plastic
Monday, June 16, 2008
This week's theme was plastic. For some reason the first thing that popped into my head was Discovery Bottles. I wasn't sure if Paige was old enough to enjoy these, but I decided to give the ocean wave bottle a try. You put water into an old water or soda bottle and add a few drops of blue food coloring. Then you put in a little bit of oil into the top of the bottle. In the past I've used cooking oil, which works, but gives the bottle a yellowish tinge. This time I bought baby oil to try, and it gives the "ocean" a much cleaner look. Paige seemed to think this was cool, and said, "I want to make more bottles!" I then made the mistake of telling her about one with glitter in it, and she got all excited. So we went out to the craft store yesterday to find some glitter. While we were there we also picked up some little shells for our wave bottle.
When we got home we added the shells to our wave bottle, and made a glitter "relaxation bottle" by filling a bottle with corn syrup and glitter. I discovered during this process that it would have been easier to just add some glitter to a bottle of corn syrup than to put corn syrup into a soda bottle. So I experimented and ended up putting all the corn syrup back in the corn syrup bottle. Finally we made a bubble bottle by filling a bottle with water and a few squirts of dish detergent. Just shake it up and you have bubbles!
There are tons of ideas for these bottles out there. Try searching for "Discovery Bottles" and you'll come up with lots of ideas.
June 16, 2008 at 10:59 PM
Fun idea! Did she try opening them? Or did they leak? I can just see my kids opening them and dumping it all out! I bet I could glue the lid on some how.
Thanks for sharing!
June 17, 2008 at 7:31 AM
these are great!! thank you I will try them with my daughters... they will love it..
I sure duct tape can seal anything :)
June 17, 2008 at 8:02 AM
I didn't go so far as to seal them, but if she keeps liking to play with them, I might. It is suggested on some of the web sites I looked at that you use a little hot glue in the threads of the top of the bottle to seal the cap on. I'm sure duct tape would work too!
I hope you try some of them out! I've seen them on lots of teacher websites in science centers. There are lots of different concepts that teachers are using bottles to study. If you try them, let me know - I'd love to see how it went!
June 17, 2008 at 9:47 AM
Those came out great. I love discovery bottles. I have made so much for the boys. I did hot glue the covers on mine. The boys still have not gotten them off. thanks for sharing.
June 17, 2008 at 12:45 PM
I love this! I've been wanting to make something for the baby to play with because she loves when we give her our water bottles, but now I'll have the big girls help me, and we can make a few varieties! Very cute!
June 17, 2008 at 12:57 PM
A great project! I made a wave bottle for my son when he was younger and he loved it. Now that he's old enough to make one himself, we'll have to add it to the project list.
June 17, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Those look like so much fun to make and seem really easy, too. Awesome!
June 17, 2008 at 3:44 PM
Those look like a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing your tips that you learned too. That is always useful! We'll have to try some of those ideas. Hope to see you next week!