Learning About Bubbles

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The girl has always loved bubbles. We have made our own bubble solution many times before, and we need to make some for this season. I’ve extolled the joys of giant bubble wands, and at a neighbor’s house the other night she made a beaded bubble wand like this one from the Artful Parent.

Playing with bubbles provides us the opportunity for learning about bubbles, both how the bubbles we make work and how bubbles exist in nature.

Books about Bubbles

As usual, I headed to the local library to see if I could find any books about bubbles to extend our learning, and I did find a couple.

Pop! A Book about Bubbles by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is a good book for kindergarten to second grade that covers what is happening as you blow a bubble, what makes bubbles pop and how bubbles change shape when they touch each other or land on a surface. This is a great book for all your kids’ why questions, such as why are bubbles round (the air inside the bubble pushes evenly in every direction) and why do bubbles pop even when they don’t touch anything (the soap skin dries out and can’t hold all the air inside it).

The book also includes a basic recipe for bubble solution and a couple of experiments. One talks about using bubble wands of different shapes and whether you can make bubbles of different shapes, while the other asks you to blow bubbles using soft and hard breath and noticing how that changes the size of the bubbles made.

Here’s a video of the book being read aloud if you can’t find this one at your library:

The Nature and Science of Bubbles by Jane Burton and Kim Taylor looks at bubbles in nature, covering topics like why bubbles are round, bubbles in and out of water, animals that live in water but breathe air, frozen bubbles, bugs that make bubbles, bubbles as floats and more. This one is better for slightly older kids or your younger ones who are really into science and animals.