STEAM Messy Play: Ooblek, Jello, & Test-Tubes

Hi Play Lab Parents!

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. Like many of you, I’m a working mom of a two year old daughter constantly looking for activities! I’m trying out all the tips I share, so I thought I’d try something new and include my personalized experiences with them. 

In this article we’ll go over STEAM-PROJECTS: OOBLEK, JELLO, & LITTLE SCIENTIST ACTIVITIES

OOBLEK

This morning when my daughter started out the day by bringing over all her art canvases and spreading them on the living room floor chanting “Aht” (art), I was both extremely gratified and had an “Oh no” feeling in my gut. “Aht” means mess and time and attention and as much as I want to always cultivate her desire for “Aht,” today, I had none.

So. Enter Ooblek. Ooblek’s status as a non-Newtonian Fluid makes it a STEAM-worthy activity. Tell your kid that, like them, Ooblek breaks the rules. Mysteriously refusing to remain either a solid or a fluid, it instead acts like both. Fun fact, so does ketchup! For older kids, this can be a learning opportunity to discuss solids, fluids, and terms like “particles.” 

Explain that corn starch’s particles are narrow and skinny. When mixed with water rather than dissolve they remain suspended between both states of fluid and solid. 

Have your child stir the Ooblek slowly and watch the particles slip past each other. Speed up the stirring to note how the particles collide causing the Ooblek to harden. (Also, I don’t recommend holding on to the Ooblek too long after the activity. It’s not a play-and-stay activity, we discovered.)

Suggested Ingredients:

• Blast Cher on the surround-sound speakers and put out newspapers

• Whole Foods food coloring (which I only had on hand because when my daughter was around four months I freaked out about her needing some sort of sensory-art related activity and ordered them well before she could really enjoy them - which, she didn’t)

• An actual pan (in lieu of pie pan)

• A wooden mixing spoon (we barely used this)

• A ½ measuring cup (we’ve lost or broken the full cup)

• Corn Starch (originally bought to make Chinese food with but didn’t)

• A plastic cup of water

• “The Enchanted Forest Cookbook” (because my daughter insisted for some reasons of her own)

• + Change of clothes

NOTE- While the recipe wrote that food coloring was optional, for us that it made the activity.

Duration of Interest: 25 minutes 

This lasted 25 minutes before she suddenly absolutely hated feeling the Ooblek on her and we washed her hands and feet in the sink. It was just short enough that it was doable to grab a quick break from work to make and just long enough that I felt good about my mommying (yes, this shouldn’t require an activity, yes it does …) But as soon as we finished and I had that warm feeling in my tummy looking at my daughter’s smile and Ooblek-covered hands and feet, she looked at me hopefully, and said, “Cook now?”

Clean up time (see: place toddler in the sink) duration time: Around 7 minutes

Scale of 1 to 10: 7

Easy to set up, not very messy, didn’t take up a lot of time, it was fun, educational, and pretty, requiring motor skills and color-selection

PROJECT - RESCUE - JELLO

I’ll be brief. Perhaps if I’d have eaten jello before embarking on this activity, I’d have done it differently. But as a non-jello eater, this is what I did. Presumably most of you have by now eaten jello and may therefore have a better experience than me.

Suggested Ingredients:

• Place a bunch of plastic toys in a large tupperware dish

• Make Jello in same dish then chill - show kiddos the before and after here for the chemical reaction

• Serve to said kiddo

Jello’s a STEAM-activity? That’s right! Jello’s trademark of solidifying as it cools is a chemical reaction that’s also an easy one for littles to note while digging out the toys (ie “Jello - Rescue”) develops fine motor skills and problem solving.

Seated on the foam tiles of the living room floor, my daughter was not happy to discover her beloved farm animals trapped in the gooey regions of jello-land. Only a strong desire to save her pigs, cows, cats, dogs, and the rest could’ve driven her to reach into the quivering sticky red much to pull them free. I had to help. Once all twelve (clearly my mistake) were loose, we instantly ran to the sink and washed our hands and the barnyard critters. It didn’t matter what we did, I was scraping red gelatinous sticky bits from the nether regions of cats and cows for weeks. And somehow the red jello ended up in her hair (that one I understand), her bedroom rug, and covered her sheet to such an extent that my husband called me to examine her and her crib in panic, it also made it to the car seat a full month later(this boggles me).

Project score: 1

Duration of Interest and Clean Up Time: I don’t even know how to begin measuring this.

Enter at your own peril. No, I did not take a picture. Kidding.

LITTLE SCIENTISTS ACTIVITIES

We purchased this kit for our little scientists activities. It came with test tubes, droppers, cups, and something called “lab” tubes. As per The Play Lab founder Magda’s suggestion, we filled up one test tube with kitchen soap (ours is Down, my husband would disown me if I ever bought a different cleaner), another with oil, and a third with water, then gave our daughter a couple of tupperware containers and some food coloring. 

After squeezing food coloring into everything, we combined our test tubes noting which stayed separate, which mixed, which bubbled, and which changed colors. The red oil wouldn’t mix with the blue water and the two colors remained separate in the one container. When the water and the soap mixed it turned to bubbles, and then the soap met the oil, the oil shot free like tiny tadpoles. Eventually we poured it into the two large tupperwares and then topped it off with a cup full of gray stones. It looked like little tadpoles shooting off into a volcanic stream.

This or variations of it have become a mainstay in our household, in the morning happily she goes right to her kitchen drawer to get her tupperware, test tubes, and food coloring out, then gets to work all on her own. Sometimes we add flour. She prefers rocks.

Project: 1-10 = 8

Duration of Interest: this lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to 45, on her own.

Clean-up: There’s generally some water spillage but not a large amount. The food coloring washes out of her clothes (if we launder it in a reasonable time).

Check toddler class schedule at The Play Lab! Our Winter semester is in session and you can still join for a few classes. And - enrollment for exciting spring class semester has just started.

Stay tuned for our next STEAM article - 5 Easy STEAM activities to do from home.