Somehow a spoon and some child chopsticks (which act a bit like tongs) were added to the play, with morphed into a fine motor game of picking up and transferring the water beads from one cookie cutter to the next. Once our fascination with the science of water bead absorption and colour density had run it’s course, the kids had lots of fun just playing with the beads.
(There are lots of fancy light tables that you can buy, but we just use our DIY light table that I made earlier). The light table also provided a fantastic medium to examine transparency, especially with the effect of the different sized beads. This happened before the larger ones had lost their lumps! We also noticed that the colour of these small spheres was much more intense than the larger spheres that had absorbed more water. The fascinating thing was that the smallest, very bumpy beads lost their ‘bumpiness’ after a period of time, and became perfectly smooth small spheres. And so on until we had a selection of water beads, all at different stages of water absorption. After another minute (or so), we removed some more of the (slightly larger, but still very bumpy) water beads from the vase, and put them on the light table, in the second smallest cookie cutter. This time we removed a few of the water beads after only a minute (or so) of water absorption, and put these (small and very bumpy) beads on the light table in the smallest of our star shaped cookie cutters. We soak our water beads in a large glass vase. They start out as small, hard beads, but become very bumpy as they initially absorb water, and then gradually morph into a awkward lumpy shape, before finally developing into the perfect sphere that water beads are generally associated with. Normally water beads take on different shapes as they grow and absorb water.
On this occasion, we decided to experiment by studying water beads at different stages of the water absorption process.
Our obsession with water beads this past week reminded me that I hadn’t yet shared these gorgeous photos of my girls playing with water beads on the light table from a few months ago.
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