Looking for a great bubble recipe?

It is SUMMER!  Finally.....

The long winter and cold weather months have given way to some bright sunny days and we are ready for PLAY!!

We have been studying letters A-Z for the month of June with our Mother Goose Time curriculum as a review of what we learned all throughout the year.  As always, we build our units around play. 

So what do you get when you mix the letter "B" with summertime?  Beach, bubble, babies, and blueberries!!!  We tried many, many different bubble recipes and landed on this one that works VERY well.  So well, in fact, that we actually had to dilute it a bit!  

Here it is for all you mama's and daddies out there keeping kiddos busy this summer!  Keep reading...I have a clay recipe for the letter "C" coming too!!

We tried LOTS of recipes to make the perfect bubble!

We made our own bubble wands with pipe cleaners so we could make them into different shapes!

We observed that regardless of the shape of the wand, the bubbles always turned out to be spheres!

Our littles quickly found a faster way to make a bubble!! No wand required!!!

We made triangle, square, and oval bubble wands with pipe cleaners!  

We also tried our pre-made bubble wands.  We tried wire hangers bubble wands.  Hands DOWN our pipe cleaner bubble wands were the BEST and made the bubble recipe work optimally. 

We made oval and triangular shapes for our giant bubbles. The bubbles ALWAYS came out as spheres regardless of the wand shape. This amazed our older preschoolers!!

We poured our homemade bubbles into one of our water tables to allow access to everyone. Our itty bitties preferred to have their in the bubble containers with the big wands!

THIS is STEAM play!!  What is STEAM play?  I thought you would never ask ;)...

Simply, S.T.E.A.M. is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math.  It used to be primarily referred to as S.T.E.M. play.  Arts was brushed to the Creative Arts category of education.  However, more recently the Early Childhood Education community has added the "A" for Arts recognizing that Art is intermingled with Math, Science, Engineering, and Technology.  I agree wholeheartedly.  Lucky for us our Mother Goose Time curriculum provides many oppotunities for play built around S.T.E.A.M.

We observed through our bubble experiment that a colors (Science and Art) swirled around the sphere.  We introduced the vocabulary word "sphere" (Math and Art) yet again as recognizing 3 Dimensional shapes is a Kindergarten readiness requirement.  This is an EASY sell for preschoolers with bubble play!!  

"Look at THAT sphere, Ms. Donna!!  It's HUGE!!"  

S.T.E.A.M. play allows children to make connections between these and further build on them with other medium.  Here we built with pipe cleaners, wire hangers, plastic wands, our hands.  We used many different recipes and hypothesized which would work and therefore be our FAVORITE!  

We even brought music and counting into the mix with this sweet song...

We used our bubbles with socks!

This SWEET idea came to me from Mother Goose Time as a part of our S.T.E.A.M. play.  This was SO FUN and a great workout for little lungs.  I didn't get pix of this one as we had socks flying off of little feet as they tried to make more "bubbles."  What would have been great would have been a picture of me trying to keep socks and shoes on while chasing giggling, wiggling tots!!!

And the winner is.......

We tried just about every Pinterest recipe out there, but when it came down to it, our oldie but goodie from the book, "Rainy Day Activity Book," by Jennifer Rader. You can still get it on Amazon and even though it is over 20 years old (man am I showing my age!!) it is FULL of recipes I have been using for a very long time.  

These bubbles last in the air, in our hands, on the ground, are able to be caught and released again!  This makes for happy kiddos and happy days!!  

As always, I wish you well and I hope you get to play today!!

​-L