Do your kids love bubbles? This homemade bubble solution will be a hit! And, what’s even better? They’ll love learning about what makes bubbles work as they do. Blowing bubbles will be fun for everyone – you included!
Bubbles are pockets of soap and water that are filled with air. When soap and water are mixed together and the air is blown into the mixture, the soap forms a thin skin or wall and traps the air, creating a bubble.
Soap bubbles are not the only kind of bubbles. You can find bubbles in lots of liquids. You might see small bubbles in plain water, but they will always be in the water or floating on the surface of the water, not floating through the air.
There are bubbles in soda pop, too. The special thing about soap bubbles is that they can float freely in the air; they don’t have to be touching water or another liquid like most bubbles do. Can you find other bubbles around your house? What about something that is round and filled with air like a bubble?
(Some examples are balls, balloons, and bubble wrap.)
How does soap help make bubbles out of water? Soap makes the surface tension of water weaker than normal.
It also forms a very thin skin that is more flexible than water. When the air gets trapped under the surface of the mixture of soap and water, the flexible skin stretches into a sphere shape (round like a ball), making a bubble!
You can see the flexible skin that forms a bubble by dipping a bubble wand into some bubble solution. When you pull it out, the hole will be filled with a stretchable skin of liquid. If you blow gently on the skin, you’ll blow a bubble!
Since bubbles are made from soap and water, they can only last as long as the water lasts. In dry air, water evaporates- it is soaked up by the dry air around the bubble and the skin of the bubble gets thinner and thinner until it finally pops!
Evaporation isn’t the only thing that pops bubbles. Anything dry can pop them. When a bubble floats through the air and lands on your finger, on a blade of dry grass, the wall of your house, or your pet’s fur, the bubble will pop.
When something sharp and dry touches the bubble, it pokes a hole in the bubble’s skin, all the air goes out of it, and the bubble disappears! To learn how to touch a bubble without popping it, do the trick below in the Bubble Tricks experiment.
Follow this DIY homemade bubble recipe using a “secret” ingredient that will not only get you strong bubbles but giant bubbles! Compare this easy recipe with any mixture of soap and water.
Bubble Mixture Supplies:
What to do:
This experiment can be done with your homemade bubble solution and is an example of the
Because making bubbles and bubble blowing is so much fun, try this fun simple recipe for making frozen bubbles.
Bubble solution is mostly made up of water. You already know that water freezes when it reaches a certain temperature and that you can make ice cubes by filling trays with water and leaving them in the freezer. Because the wall of a bubble is so thin, bubbles will freeze in a pretty short amount of time. Try this experiment with your homemade bubble solution and see what happens!
You can have more bubble fun by taking the original homemade bubble solution and making it colored with a few drops of food coloring to have a colored bubble solution! Only one switch out to make from the original solution, instead of using regular Dawn dish soap, be sure to use a clear dish soap, like Dawn Essentials.
Big bubbles, colored bubbles, frozen bubbles, or just regular old bubbles, all make science fun. And, by making your own homemade bubble solution, you’ll save money and time!