What you will need: 

  • Washing up liquid
  • Water
  • Glycerine
  • A bowl
  • A baking tray
  • Straws
  • Toilet roll holders
  • Bubble guns and bubble pots (if you have them)

  • In the bowl mix together 1 cup washing up liquid with 9 cups of water.
  • if you have some add 3 cups of glycerine (we didn’t have any so didn’t use, but this is supposed to make the bubbles stronger).
  • Pour the bubble mixture into the baking tray ready for the play

You may be wondering why there are some scrubbing gloves in the picture above. In the workshop we saw the guy catch bubbles on a glove so wanted to give this a go. My little mess maker got these out to try but we couldn’t get them to work so we put them away again!

 

       

The boy’s were both quick to get involved with using the straws to blow bubbles on the tray. My eldest was trying to make them as big as he could while his little brother loved nothing more than to pop them as soon as he could, much to his brother’s annoyance at times.

We also used the straws to blow bubbles into the air by dipping the straw in the liquid and then slowly blowing through it.

We next tried blowing a bubble from the toilet roll. Again we dipped the toilet roll into the liquid and held the roll away from our mouths to try and blow. This was a lot harder although I managed to blow a couple of bubbles the boys couldn’t quite muster this one.

One of the favourite elements of this activity was using our bubble guns to add hundreds of bubbles to the tray and making a bubble mountain. Both loved this and got very excited with the bubbles climbing higher and higher.

 

Once the mountain was high enough the challenge was then to pop the bubbles as quick as they could, either with their hands or by blowing which resulted as you can imagine with bubbles going everywhere!

After the mountain was popped it was back to the straw again and with some determination my eldest made some really big bubbles (before the were popped by his brother) he even managed to blow smaller bubbles inside of the larger bubbles!

  

One element of this activity was exploring and talking about the different colours and shapes made by the bubbles as they sat on the tray with some really beautiful patterns made.

   

For such a simple activity this has kept both of my boys fascinated and engaged for two days running and unless the solution gets spilt (like on our first attempt) it can be kept and used again and again.

If you would like to check out the Bubbleologist who inspired us for this activity you can find him here.

I hope you and your little ones have as much fun as we did with this activity.

There are LOADS more Messy play and craft ideas over at our blog.

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