DIY Lava Lamps {Homemade}

The kids and I have been creating DIY Lava Lamps for the last few days.  It's a lot of fun and you only need a few things to make them work.  We used various sized clear containers, water, vegetable oil, various colors of food coloring drops and Alka-Seltzer tabs. 

Above is the pack that we used.

We had everything on hand except the Alka-Seltzer tabs but I found them easily at the grocery store.  We used various containers because we wanted to see if smaller ones worked better than bigger ones and vice versa.  We made sure they were all clear so that we could see the lava lamp in action.  Once you select your clear containers you need to fill them with water and vegetable oil.  It doesn't matter which one you add first as the oil will always float to the top as it is less dense than water.  And as you probably know, oil and water do not mix so they will form two distinct layers.  We filled some of our container with water first and then added oil and vice versa so the kids could see what happened each way.  We did not measure exact amounts for our lava lamps.  We made sure we added enough water so there would be a visible water layer and we added more vegetable oil than water so our oil layer was noticeably larger.

The kids added drops of food coloring next.  Some of them chose to use one color and some of them chose to add a few different colors.  B chose to add pink and blue food coloring drops that eventually mixed together to create purple.  Similarly, C used yellow and blue drops that eventually formed green.

Watching our lava lamps.

Above you can see the colors joining together to form purple.

 

In our experiments the hourglass vase with the rounder bottom did the best!

The kids with our homemade lava lamps.

{You can see the different shaped containers that we used.}

After the Alka-Seltzer tabs had dissolved, the kids dropped in another tablet to begin their lamps once more.  You can add more tablets to your heart's content.  The kids enjoyed doing it several times.  Enjoy our video below and let me know if you make your own lava lamp!