My children always enjoyed playing with tubes and connectors in the bath tub. They would join the tubes and connectors in many different ways, and they would put a funnel in the top to make it easier to put water into the contraption. If you tint the water blue or some other color (you can buy something that looks like pills at Toys R Us or Walmart in the children’s bath section), the children can see the water rushing through the clear tubing. If you have two possible ways for the water to go, you can ask your children which way they think the water will go. Sometimes it goes both ways equally, but often it will go down only one tube. You can talk about gravity and see what happens if you tilt the whole contraption.
One really fun experiment you can do is to combine two different colors to see what new color emerges. Put one color of water down one tube
, and another color down another tube at the same time, and see what color comes out at the bottom. If you have no money for those color pills, you can use food coloring from your kitchen, and I would do it outside, making it land in a wide bucket. Your kids should wear old clothes, because food coloring can stain your clothes.
You can have a great time even if you just use clear water. My children built and designed many contraptions, and they never built the same thing twice. It was an open-ended activity that was educational as well as fun.
If you like this idea, you will love my audio workshop entitled “Bath Time Fun: 49 Ideas for Homeschoolers,” available on my website.
I’m giving away one copy of the Bath Time Fun workshop. Enter the drawing below:
