Lydia does Science

At Lydia's school we have had a few homework assignments. First we had to make a collage of her family and most important people. So they could share it at school. And then we were asked to make a sensory bottle. There was a very nice handout with several options but Eliot and I liked the Density Bottle the best. It seemed cool.
The ingredients were the following:

• honey


• corn syrup


• dawn dish soap


• colored water


• vegetable oil

It is a preschoolers homework so it's rather simple. You pour some of each in this order in the bottle what was sent home. We even had a funnel.

They suggested we colored the water so Lydia picked blue. Well actually she picked purple but the red and blue food coloring dyes made it too dark and it wasn't bright enough to stand out. So blue it was.

A few things did go awry. First the Dawn Dish soap we had was not the traditional type, it was the antibacterial kind which I think made a difference when we poured in the water. The blue water was just absorbed by the soap and so we instantly had 4 layers instead of 5.

Then I accidently closed the bottle the teacher sent home with the vegetable oil bottle's top. The wrong top got stuck on. It was stuck on lopsided. Something about the combination of varies sticky oily drippy liquids with a lopsided wrong top caused this thing to be a permanently placed on it. We got tools. It didn't help. We used that cool rubber jar opener to help hold it steady. It didn't help.

We ended up making 2 more in different bottles. We used a Publix 16 ounce water bottle which after sealed feel and the whole thing turned into mush. Brown thick yuck. We left it on the kitchen counter to see if it would naturally balance out. It didn't. Then, we used the honey bear bottle which did keep the strata format which was intended but the water wasn't noticeable therefore only 4 layers rather than 5.
I would give us an A for effort. A B for the bear, because we didn't really follow all the directions since there was no footnote about antibacterial soap. And a colossal failure for the original little bottle. Here is a link for the project from a mommy blogger with what the actual bottle should look like.