A useful bit of knowledge to have under your belt is that baking soda plus vinegar produces a gentle fizz. This chemical romance is the premise beneath volcanoes you may have produced at a science fair as a child. And if you were deprived of that pleasure, well, there’s no time like the present.
I bought enough of both baking soda and white vinegar to keep some with our outdoor toys so it could become an activity the kids occupy themselves with in the backyard. I didn’t exactly have a plan. Since my kids have outgrown our water/sand table, I was thinking we could do something different or weird with it, like use the compartments for different experiments. Unfortunately, cleaning the old wet sand out of the table turned out to be too much of a hurdle for me, and I am still hoping a magic fairy comes to my backyard to take care of that for me someday.
The activity that evolved was first making chalk drawings, then sprinkling baking soda on top of them and squirting vinegar to watch them fizz.
Julian loved rubbing his hands around in the results, and the materials are non-toxic, so, whatevs. Eventually, Scarlett felt that simply sprinkling baking soda on a rock and pouring vinegar on top of that was the most satisfying thing. Who am I to judge?
In this video, my kids share their project with you.
Great idea and am gonna try it! By the way, you can probably find someone to take that sand away via Freecycle. I met some really nice folks through Freecycle who stuffed all my sand into pillowcases to use for sandbags for some kind of water reclamation project on their roof…Ah, Berkeley.
We’ve been doing lots of baking soda and vinegar projects lately. The most recent success was a pinterest find where I filled a shallow pan with baking soda, then mixed different colors of food coloring with vinegar in a muffin pan (one color per hole) and let the kids drop it into the plate with an eyedropper.
Thanks for the great idea Whitney! Found your pin on Pinterest. We just spent the afternoon doing it and had a blast! We also tried coloring sand with chalk, mixing in the baking soda and pouring on the vinegar. Milan just loved it. Want to also try making a sand volcano this way…
Wendy – want to try that too!
anyone know if this is bad to go down the storm sewers?? our sewer has a picture of a fish on it so not sure where exactly it goes.
Re;sand disposal…use it on your lawn, its good for the lawn and my husband empties the kids sandbox every year and rakes in into the lawn and then buys new playsand for the box.
Watch out with this one!!
I usually love all your Rookie Mom suggestions – but this one turned out haszardous for my toddler on the 4th of July! We had fun with the chalk, but then I got a spray bottle of vinegar out to spray over the chalk and baking soda. My 19 month old grabbed the vinegar spray bottle out of my hand and sprayed it into his face and right eye!!
We immeadiatly started rinsing his eye (pouring cups of water over his face) and called poision control. This can lead to a trip to the ER if you aren’t careful.
My poor baby was totally traumatized and it lead to a very depressing afternoon.