This week, Miss G and I have been participating in a candy play series with several other mamas and munchkins. The goal has been to experiment with candy and come up with several fun and uinique ways to creat, play, and explore with the Halloween treats that will soon be making their way into our houses. On Monday we created beautiful glossy paint using Skittles, on Tuesday we created mouldable and edible candy clay, on Wednesday we sorted, counted, and graphed SweeTARTS. and yesterday we used our goodies to make fun candy jewellery.
This is by no means an original idea… In fact, I’ve seen it around the web several times before {like here and here}. But cool? YES. Soooo cool. Like magic milk paint, I think it’s just one of those things you have to try yourself and see in person. It’s that cool. Plus, when teaching I’d always fret about the teeth of my munchkins who seemed to get multiple backs of Gobstoppers each year around Halloween. Well, this is the perfect way to enjoy them without having to worry about your little one’s teeth or sugar consumption.
The activity, as well as the lineup of required materials is really simple, which we love around here. All you really need besides some Gobstoppers is some room temperature water and a plate or dish of some sort.
To start us off, I asked my little kitty friend to arrange a few jawbreakers on the plate, with plenty of space in between one another.
She decided to go with 3 candies – 1 purple, 1 green, and 1 red.
Then she carefully poured some water onto the plate making sure that all of the candies were partially submerged.
In just a few seconds, we noticed this.
And the longer we watched, the more interesting it got. Do you see how the green and purple candy dyes have met but are not mixing with one another? So neat!
After seeing the results of our small experiment, we decided to go BIG. I retrieved a large baking dish from the kitchen and Grae rounded up multiple candies in each colour. We carefully placed them in the dish keeping the same coloured candies close to one another. Miss G decided that all of the colours got 4 candies, but yellow got 5 ‘because it’s in the middle’. {Sounds logical, no?}
Then she poured in our water and we immediately saw huge results.
Pretty, right?
I was interested to see what would happen with the colours this time around with one set of candies in the middle, and sure enough, the wedges of colour ran into one another and stopped. So interesting! {Now if only I could find a clear explanation of why exactly this happens…}
We left our experiment out for the afternoon and eventually the colours did start to blend, which was insanely pretty. Once Halloween rolls around, we’ll definitely be trying this experiment again. It’ll be very interesting to see if the same thing would happen with other candy coated treats too… Perhaps Smarties, M&Ms, or Skittles would work the same way? We’ll have to wait and see!
Now for a bunch of other fun candy-themed art activities… Click on the links to see creative ideas from some of my favourite kid bloggers from around the web.
sink or float candy science | balloon experiments with candy | balancing with M&M’s
candy corn catapults | exploding peep geysers | candy chromatography
Miss G and I have had so much fun learning, creating, and exploring with candy this week, and although today is the last day of the play series, there will definitely be more candy fun happening in our house near the month’s end.
If you’ve missed part of our fun candy series, pop on over here for a full recap.
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What a cool idea! The colors are gorgeous!