Blowing bubbles

lots and lots of bubbles

Blowing bubbles is not only fun but its a great way to train up mouth muscles and help with pronunciation - sounds do not just come automatically a mouth has to be mature enough to wrap your tongue around them!!

Of course there is science in bubbles too - to talk about why they are always round, even when you blow through something that is square or star-shaped? Do bubbles stay round when they meet another bubble? What colours can be seen? Why do bubbles pop - and then sometimes you can slide your finger carefully into the centre of one?....

A great mouth training and bubble activity is bubble painting - taking a cup with bubble mix and paint in it and then getting a child to blow through a straw to make it bubble up to the top (or over onto the table) MESSY WARNING!! Then to capture the bubbles on paper.

a bubble print - when they were dry we cut them out and they became planets...

 Of course for some children capturing the bubble-prints is a rather secondary activity - making lots of bubbles being the most important part of the activity - and being allowed to make a mess only heightens the fun. Watching the colours spread across a table and then start to mix into each other - well more exploration, more science... who am I to stop that?

and when there is lots of colour everywhere - then its fun to blow air and see how it moves and flows across the table!

On this occasion the children exploring discovered they could make new patterns by blowing into the overflow - the table re-appeared - bubbles sailed across the table (and of course I was thinking - yes more mouth training, more exploration, more discovery...) for the children its fun and laughter - they do not notice that I can see their brains ticking, they do not know they are learning. So it is great when in the middle of a morning meeting when children are talking about preschool and school and they say they don't learn anything in preschool I can remind them, bring out the photographs and show them how they learnt about bubbles, wind and colour (or whatever the documentation relates to) - suddenly children get to see their own learning - adding another layer of learning, a new depth to their understanding of the experience... and then it is to give it another go to allow them to apply this learning...

Oh and cleaning up after this activity was almost better than the actual activity for three of the children. They got to clean on the pots of different coloured paints in the long trough like sink together - and they marveled at all the bubbles and how the colours mixed to make new colours - and handing over a couple of whisks to the experience allowed for a whole load of role-play to slip into the action - lots of language to test their pronunciation skills - lol!