You know you want to.

Grow your own rice. How cool is that?

Very cool. But very slowly.

Surface tension.

This is a cool experiment that my dad showed us while he was here.

Get a plate with a lip and fill it with milk. (Water would probably work, but you couldn't see the colors moving as well.) Put three drops of each color of food coloring in the milk.



Put one drop of dishwashing liquid in the center of the plate.



The food coloring zips to the outer edge of the plate, which is pretty fun to watch in and of itself. But the real fun comes a few seconds later. The dishwashing liquid destroys the surface tension of the milk and starts sucking the food coloring underneath and up through the soap drop. Very cool patterns emerge.







If you left it going long enough, the colors would all blend evenly and the milk would turn brown.

Making waves.

We made wavemakers. It's a simple craft, even with toddlers.

First you pour water into your bottle. We used one big bottle to learn on and two small water bottles for the girls to do their individual thing with.



Then you add food coloring, glitter, beads, whatever you want.





Then you pour in oil. Word of warning - pour it slow. Pouring it fast causes it to cloud up. We used regular vegetable oil that's been sitting in my cupboard for the last three years or so since I stopped using regular vegetable oil. It's good to have that gone.



Then you close it up, tape over the lid for extra protection and let the kids play!





These have been really fun for the girls - I even threw the heavy suckers (not the big one) in my purse as a take-along entertainment. They are good for a few minutes of distraction.

They've been fun for me to play with also. The oil/water meeting point is really interesting to play with. You can make some cool looking waves at that point.