Toddler Nebula Arts and Crafts

We created four different types of art today based on nebula clouds (nebula clouds are where solar systems are created as the suns and planets are formed from the rock, gas and other materials in the nebula).
They all involved experimenting with reactions and one of them was process art we cannot take home.

The first experiment is known as the milk galaxy experiment although I think the different colours remind me of nebula. You start off by putting some milk in a shallow dish and then you add drops of food colouring. Our toddlers loved using the pipettes to add the swirls of colour. Once you have added two colours you then get a cotton bud and dab it in some washing up liquid, when you place the cotton bud in the milk the washing up liquid causes the food colouring to look like it was repelled or a mini explosion had happened!
What happens is the surface tension of the milk is changed when you add the washing up liquid as the latter push and pulls the fat and water molecules in the milk.

For our second experiment we repeated the shaving foam experiment from Halloween, none of today’s children had done it before so they were quite excited to see how the food colouring was left behind when we scrapped the foam off the paper.

Next we had fun experimenting with wax resist watercolour paintings on some plates, we found the lighter coloured pastels worked better than the darker ones generally.

Finally we had fun with some salt painting, which the children unanimously voted as their favourite. We actually put glue on our paper and sprinkled salt on it at the start of the session and left it to dry whilst we carried out the other activities. With the salt nice and dry we could now add blobs of watercolour paint to the salt, the children were fascinated by how the watercolours travelled along the salt crystals. They also found it interesting how the paint was different if they added it to a space with no salt. The children also experimented with how much water their paint brush had in it.