Create your own soapy bubble snakes! This activity is a great sensory activity for toddlers and preschoolers to engage in as we’re taking something familiar like bubbles and presenting them in a new way! This is also great for elementary school-aged kids as the activity can be expanded into a science activity, where they create hypotheses and test different variables to see if they yield different results!
Supplies:
Different sized plastic bottles (Make sure each child has their own bottle as they will put their mouth on it)
Scissors
Craft knife (optional and used by adult only)
Thin socks
Rubber Bands
Small dish or container
Non-toxic dish soap (option to use different types of soap like body soap if conducting an experiment)
Water
Instruction:
First, gather your supplies and set up your workstation! Remove the labels of your water bottles to make cutting them a bit easier.
Next, you are going to cut your bottle in half. With a grown up’s help, poke a hole in the side of the water bottle with either scissors or a craft knife. Then, using your scissors, start from the hole in the side and cut all the way around the bottle until you have two halves. We will be using the half with the mouthpiece, so you can recycle the bottom half of the waterbottle.
Next, we will attach our sock to our water bottle half. Pull the sock over the open end of the water bottle and fold over excess fabric so that the sock is flat against the open end of the water bottle and the mouthpiece is not covered by the sock. Wrap a rubber band around the sock to ensure it stays in place.
Then, create your bubble mixture. This is where your scientific intuition comes in! There is no exact ratio for soap to water, so experiment with a variety of different ratios to see how that changes your bubble snake! In our experiment, we used 6 pumps of dish soap and filled the rest of our container with water. Use either your finger or a spoon to mix the bubble solution.
Tip: To make this a fun science experiment, make two bubble solutions, with two different types of soap and make a hypothesis about which bubble solution will work best!
Now it’s time to create our bubble snakes! Take your “bubble wand” (water bottle) and dip the sock-side into the bubble solution. Take a deep breath in, then hold your bubble wand to your mouth and blow!!
Safety tip: Make sure that you blow OUT when you have your bubble wand to your mouth!
You just made a bubble snake!! Keep making as many as you would like. You can use the same bubble mixture to make lots of them or you could add food coloring to make some colorful snakes!