Fireworks in a Jar

Ok so the title is far more exciting than the project but it did keep my lot busy for a good 20 minutes and then rather than waste our creation we added on a short science project that has transformed this jar  into a very hypnotic toy.

Best of all it is one of those projects where you probably have most of this stuff lying around in your kitchen already.

You will need:

Food coloring
Vegetable Oil
Water
Glass Jar with lid (Ours was a sauce jar from the recycling)
Medicine dispensers
(Optional Glitter for add-on Project)

Step 1

Mix a few drops of food coloring with about 1 tbl spoon of water, we used 3 different colors so 3 cups. Mix well with fork.

The boys love being allowed to stir stuff 'super fast'.

Step 2

Fill a jar with water. Then we used our medicine dispensers to add our 'firework colors' to the jar. The oil will not mix with the water so to begin with you get really cool blobs of food coloring floating around in the jar. We called these fireworks as they 'shot' them into the 'sky' (jar).

Then the boys got really carried away squirting and after a short while, they discover that every color together = black.

Step 3

We started again but this time I limited the colors to pink and yellow.

As it dispersed the boys could see the patterns in the jar,

Step 4

As I explained to the boys how the oil and water properties kept them from mixing they wanted to know what would happen if we added more oil. So we did. And glitter just for sparkle ;)

This is the cool bit, the glitter held together as a 3rd entity in the jar, if we shook the jar really hard they would all mix but if we then left the jar to sit we discovered we had created our very own Lava Lamp.

Its hypnotic