Monday, November 22, 2010

Frozen Soap Bubbles - Winter Fun For Kids

Did you know that soap bubbles blown outside, on a really cold day will freeze, right before your eyes, as they float by?

Naturally, none of the 1000 shots of bubbles I snapped, captured the transformation. Here's one blurry one with the feathery ice beginning to form. It starts as little stars, and then fans out to encase the entire bubble.


It really is a beautiful sight, like a mixture of snowflakes, and Christmas ornaments. Click here, to see some excellent pictures on the SeaWayBLOG. When they pop, they burst apart, like deflated, icy, balloons, and the paper thin sheets of ice, drift slowly to the ground.


It's a lot of fun, if you can stand the cold. I'm not sure how cold it needs to be. We were at about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, yesterday, which worked perfectly, for blowing them the traditional way.

You have to blow the bubbles up into the air, so they have time to freeze, before they hit the ground. Our first few, were warm enough inside, that they just kept going up, and up, into the freezing sky.

You warm weather people are out of luck, I guess, unless you can talk your local grocer into letting you blow bubbles in his walk in freezer. For those of you in colder climates though, it's one more thing to be thankful for.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

10 comments:

Debbie said...

This is cool! We are sitting at 28 degrees Fahrenheit and so I went out to give it a try, but they wouldn't freeze. I guess one has to be in the teens or lower to make it work. We tried though!

Christy Killoran said...

We tried this last winter, and it is definitely very cool! I had no luck getting any pictures when we did it. It isn't cold enough here yet. We are still in the 40s, but we will certainly be doing this again - probably in January or February!

Chris said...

I just ran across your blog. What an awesome source of ideas! We will definitly be checking out the freezing bubbles idea whenever we get any snow. I'm a mom to four year old boy/girl twins and we're interet-led learners. It's fun to read a Christian mom who also believes in natural learning.

Phyllis said...

Wow,that is so cool!
Since we are from 58-66 degrees here now, we won't get a chance to do this for a long while. I am doubting we will hit 0 degrees here at all, but I will try it IF we hit the teens as Debbie suggests. What fun!

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

The pictures on another blog are amazing. I didn't think about the fact that bubbles can freeze - this is very fascinating. But I think I'll keep my 60F degrees for now :)

Unknown said...

SHAZAAM! That is so interesting! We are (I hate to say this) in the upper 60's-lower 70's for this week, so we will not be able to try this experiment for a while...

(Please don't be jealous!) :0)

Ticia said...

That is so amazingly cool! That's a definite perk to living in cold weather.

Shady Lady said...

Jut found your blog...
This is so cool! We don't usually get temps that low, but we're still going to give it a try. We're supposed to be in the 20s tomorrow.

Lady Chadwick said...

this is just in time, we are going to PA and I was thinking it was too cold for bubble stuff, but apparently it will be better in the cold!

hmm, wonder if PA is cold enough?

Darcey said...

I never thought about bubbles freezing. This is cool! I've linked up to your post on my weekly favorites here: http://play2grow.blogspot.com/2010/11/weekly-favorites-november-28-2010.html