Science Bottles

When I was a preschool teacher, I had a co-teacher who was crazy about making science bottles. Essentially, they are bottles with some sort of liquid in them that the kids could carry around, shake and see what happens. She was so creative and came up with the best ideas. I wish I would have written them down!

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot of those science bottles and have created some for Little one. He is learning his colors and I thought this would be a great way to get some practice. I took six water bottles and filled them with water, a different color of tempra paint, and either 1.) dish soap or 2.) baby oil/canola oil. The effect is that when you shake them you get some kind of bubbles. I then hot glued the lid on. I also created two that have water, oil, buttons in one and beads in the other. It's fun to watch the objects float around in the water and bubbles created by the oil.

While I was doing this I was wishing I had some sort of container for them, and remembered that Hubs had purchased wine at Whole Foods - and had brought home this groovy little carrier for the wine bottles. I covered each slot with a coordinating bottle color and wrote the name of the color. That way we can practice putting the bottles where they belong and matching the colors. I then covered the pictures of the wine bottles at the top of the box with the long strips of paper.

I know you can do many things with this concept - use glitter, yarn, corn syrup, really the ideas are limitless. I did notice that the tempra paint made a very thick color and if I were to put any other objects in the bottle, you couldn't see them. Next time I might use food color.

Now my question for you is - do you have any ideas, or have you done this before? If so, what would you do or what did you use?