F Week- Fizz!

I have done baking soda and vinegar experiments many times during my teaching career and children always love them. When I saw this pin on Pinterest for colored fizz, I thought it was a fun twist on the idea. All you do is pour some baking soda out on a tray or baking sheet, then use a medicine or eye-dropper to add small amounts of colored vinegar to the baking soda. Just like that, you have colored fizz.

I figured that Trip would like this activity, which he did, but it was a larger mess than I had anticipated. I poured some baking soda onto a pie plate and then put a small amount of vinegar in a baby food jar. I let Trip look at the food coloring and decide which color he wanted to make the vinegar. Fortunately he chose yellow, the least damaging of the four colors, because as soon as I let him try to use the medicine dropper, he was flinging yellow vinegar all over. Now this wouldn't have been such a big deal if I had chosen to do this activity outside or in the kitchen sink or bathtub. No, I had just put the pie plate on the table (which has carpet under it). He didn't do any real damage and I cleaned up the table and chair quickly, but the activity didn't last long because he got frustrated that he couldn't get the vinegar in the dropper himself and didn't want any help from me. I had hoped to add more colors, but we'll have to save that for another time.

Either way, it was fun to watch the chemical reaction and Trip liked the fizz.

This has also made me realize that a medicine dropper and some water will be a good motor activity to have Trip work on.

A more successful experiment with fizz were the fizzing bath salts that I made. I used this recipe from eHow. I had made something similar in the past, so I had all of the ingredients (bath salts, baking soda, citric acid, essential oil) and was able to whip it up just before bath time. I then spooned small amounts of it into the water. Trip loved to watch the fizz and kept asking for more. We will definitely be repeating this game in the future.