Hello, my fellow Home Child Care professionals. Today, I am writing about our science color inquiry with our favorite ingredients, baking soda and vinegar. These basic ingredients have been added to many of our play and learning. This time, however, I added some hollow balls, CDs, and mud kitchen accessories inside the tuff tray.
Here is the short back story to the CDs – we have been using CDs in our play investigation for years. This set of CDs has been outdoors for some time and used for our continuous learning inquiries, including during the snowfalls. We love to use CDs in our environment; we hang them from trees and use them in our loose parts collections, mirror play, decorations, block building, and science explorations.
Here are the contents of the tuff tray play.
- Baking soda
- Vinegar
- Bath Fizzy Colors (alternatives – watercolor paint chips/ liquid watercolor/ paint chalks/paint powder/ food coloring )
- Tuff Tray (any large shallow container can work too)
- CDs – reflective mirror-like inquiry
- Hollow Balls – added science inquiry – if the children wanted to delve deeper into sink float, color recognition, etc.
The three primary ingredients you need are baking soda, vinegar, and colors – anything else is optional.
Children love to watch the chemical reaction of mixing baking soda with vinegar. The sizzling sound is enough to hear joyful noise, giggles, and echoes of ‘look, look, look at this one!’
If you operate a mixed-age child care like me, this supervised opportunity is good for most ages. However, be mindful not to allow children to play in the solution for an extended period as this can cause discomfort to their hands (this happened to one of my littles – see the video).
One child was intrigued by the batter/putty effect of the baking soda and vinegar, which she called mud and clay.
Children who love messy sensory play are drawn to this kind of mixing and blending of ingredients. This child kept moving the batter around, between her fingers, and on top of the CD. [ Again, if you opt to do this activity with the children in your early years – please try not to have them in the solution for over 10-15 minutes, as it can cause a little tingling discomfort to their little hands] We washed hands with soapy water after play. However, you may have children who sneak back to the activity because they love the sensory feel of the mushy, squishy, oofy poofy fun.
Please see the video here. Until next time – have fun playing with the children in your daycare…xoxo Miss Sue.
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