Summer Activity for Kids (and the whole Family) – Lava Lamps

Getting Real With Wanda Morrissey

When I found this activity on the internet, I knew I had to try it. When I told my husband about it, he said I had to wait until he was home to do it. I wasn’t sure if my 3 year old would enjoy it. I thought that this was going to be an experiment mine and my husband’s inner 6 year old. But, as it turned out, the whole family had fun with this one.

What you need:

What you do: Fill the bottle more than half way with vegetable oil. Fill the bottle the rest of the way with water, leaving 1 inch of space at the top. Add food colour. (I used a 600mL bottle and 8 drops of food colour made a nice dark colour. You may need more or less depending on the size of your bottle). Let the bottle sit for a couple of minutes so the liquid inside can settle. Break an Alka Seltzer tab in four pieces and drop in one piece. Watch what happens. When things settle you can drop in another piece. You can reuse the liquid over and over again until the oil becomes cloudy.

Since we were having so much fun and were curious as to what would happen, we tried dropping in two pieces of Alka Seltzer tab and even dropping in the whole tab. It was quite the show. I put the lid on the bottle and let my son shake it up and throw it around. We played around with the bottle for about 30 minutes and then the oil got to cloudy to continue. We will definitely be doing this again.

Note: This activity can be done inside or out but we did it outside in case something spilled. As we were playing around, it occurred to me that this could be used as a school science project.