Turtles and a Toddler: Fizzy Fun

Oh the wonderful fun one can have with simple household items… 

Baking soda. 

Food coloring. 
Vinegar. 
 
The possibilities are ENDLESS! Click on “Read More” to join the fun! 


 
Because we got the Learning Resources Twisty Droppers, I feel comfortable letting Danger experiment with these items now. The droppers keep her hands out of it – not that it’s harmful, it’s just that vinegar is really smelly. Haha 
 
Hey, it not always practical to go from an activity directly into the bath, although I’m already planning some neat bath activities to contain messes. You know, that just got me thinking… If I set up an activity with baking soda and vinegar IN THE BATH, the fun will also clean my bathtub! Brilliant! 
 
Anyway… 
 
I gathered up the ingredients and was going to make a dinosaur egg “dig” for Danger after reading a similar post on Growing A Jeweled Rose – seriously, the mom who runs this blog is amazing! I was planning that she could “discover” an egg in her sand table, crack it open and then pour “acid” on it just like scientists do when they find a real dinosaur egg. However… 
 
I didn’t know if this was going to work very well so I wanted to start with something smaller than the dinosaurs I had on hand. We picked up a party favor bag at the Dollar Store filled with lizards, snakes, alligators and the like, and I decided that a bright orange turtle would be perfect for our first hunt. It would be easy for her to see and try and get to. Our supplies: 
 

 

I wanted to make a really dark shade of green for the egg so I tried combining the blue, green and the food coloring that I had and it didn’t really work. The color I made in the glass turned out very dark, but when I mixed it with the baking soda, it lightened up a lot! Next time, I’ll use black. 
 
Here was the egg before drying and some left over “turtle dirt” that we are going to soak in vinegar for the effect. 
 

 

Side note: if spiders really were pink, I think people would be a lot less scared of them. Maybe they should go on a massive PR campaign after “accidentally” getting into some hair dye. Just sayin’. 
 
I didn’t get a picture, but as I was checking to see if the egg was dry, it fell apart!! Ugh – I guess I didn’t make it moist enough! I repacked it and left it for four whole days just to be SURE it was  dry. You could crack a window with that thing after letting it dry four days. I’m sure overnight or two days would have sufficed. 
When it was time for the activity, I quickly made up some additional dirt dough in blue and brown, so that we could talk about different turtle habitats.

Armed with our dough, our vinegar and a dropper, we headed outside. I added some pink food coloring to the vinegar because, well, why not?

She’s only 18 months old, but we talked about how there have been turtles for a very long time. How long?  About 220 million years. Danger seemed interested in that they ate plants and bugs. I think it’s because she gets such a kick out of saying “bugs,” because she says it exactly how it sounds when Mom and Dad say it.
Elise was curious about the dirt dough and immediately ran her fingers trhough it, squeezed it, and lifted it up so that it could fall through her fingers. Mom and Dad then showed her what the droppers did to it… She squirted the egg until she could see the orange turtle, picked it up, and then just started to manhandle it until the turtle showed itself!

 

It was then time to exhaust our supply of vinegar to make as many fizzy bubbles as was humanly possible!

 

Once our table was a colorful mush, we hopped into the tiny pool to wash some of it off. Daddy and Danger had tons of fun while she tried to pop bubbles from the bubble blower.

After a good bit of splashing, it was time to hop back and forth between the turtle table and pool. We added water to the baking soda dirt dough and talked about why it didn’t work the same as the vinegar – she couldn’t have cared less! It was still boatloads of fun.

 

Clean up was easy-peazy…

 

It is wicked warm here – ok, warm for the Pacific Nortwest at just above 90 degrees. Because of that, the new siding going on, and just the general construction site that our house has become, we will be very limited in our activities this week. We will sill have loads of fun though, I’m sure.
We hope you get a chance to play in the dirt!
 
Ruffles and Rain Boots, toddler crafts, toddler activities, fun crafts for kids, rainy day activities, sarcastic mom
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