Water Beads!

It's been a very long time since I blogged! Life gets busy with 4 kids...But we've been doing some fun stuff around here so I thought I'd share. 

Water beads are the latest craze at our house. I can thank my awesome neighbor for this one! She brought me a package of water beads last week. They are teen tiny balls, (usually used in floral arrangements), that expand in water. They aren't meant for children to play with, but I thought it would be fun to experiment with them, and to put in our water table. 

They are so small in the package! They are about the size of a tiny seed.

You can barely see one water bead on a penny. 

We put them in water and waited and waited and waited. It takes about 4-6 hours of the water beads to fully expand. It was a great way to introduce absorption to Mason. While in the water, you can barely see them, which was really interesting. I gave the kids spoons to try and fish some of the water beads out while they were absorbing the water. 

 A few hours into the project we decided to put colored water in a few bowls and see if the beads would be colored. The colors weren't bright, but it was still fun to see them change from clear to colored.

                                                                                                     

We ended up with a bucket full of beautifully colored water beads which the kids played with all day. Unfortunately the water beads lost their color over night. We woke up to clear water beads! I suppose I should have used  permanent dye, instead of food coloring! Maybe next time. Water beads aren't harmful to the environment and shrink back up to their seed size when out of water for a few days. So when Mason gets tired of them, we will just toss them out. We added measuring cups, a funnel and some spoons to our water table for some squishy water bead fun.