Water Beads

A blog I follow talks about water beads and how great they are all the time.  Recently I saw them and decided to go ahead and make the purchase and just hang on to them until I wanted to give it a try.  With both the girls sick and home from school, I though this seemed a great time to give it a go!

They start out really tiny.

Adding water to our tub.

Already growing.

Exploring them right after we added the water.

On the light table...

They added a few of their small, hard creatures.

We did this for about 45 minutes before the girls grew tired of it.  I covered the tub and left them to explore later because I knew the beads would get bigger.

Checking out how much bigger the beads grew!

Quite a few rags were used in this activity.

One bead so we could compare the size.

That exploration lasted another 45 minutes or so before they took a break.  After a while I suggested that we let them play with the beads in the bathtub.  They loved it.

 

 I did not love it.  The beads cannot go down the drain and they smashed a bunch of them while playing so I ended up spending a long time fishing out all the parts from the bathwater.  The lady on the blog does this and never talks about them getting so smushed so she either doesn't use as many in the tub, her kids are smaller, or her kids don't play quiet as hard as mine in the tub!  Regardless, it was a great activity for us to do all day long.