How to brighten your mood in 5 min

Enjoy these three colorful, easy, and quick experiments with your family!

Safe­ty pre­cau­tions

Warn­ing! Only un­der adult su­per­vi­sion.

Equip­ment

  • salt;
  • sta­tionery glue;
  • pipette;
  • tint­ed wa­ter;
  • pa­per;
  • cray­on nubs;
  • sil­i­cone mold;
  • oven;
  • fine sand;
  • PVA glue;
  • con­tact lens so­lu­tion;
  • bak­ing soda;
  • wa­ter­col­ors or gouache.

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

Mix PVA glue, wa­ter­col­or or gouache paint, and con­tact lens so­lu­tion. Add a lit­tle bak­ing soda if nec­es­sary. When the mix­ture thick­ens, add a lot of fine sand and mix well – this makes ki­net­ic sand!

Write some­thing on a piece of pa­per with sta­tionery glue, pour a large quan­ti­ty of salt over it, and re­move the ex­cess. Use a pipette to ap­ply tint­ed wa­ter – the words bloom with col­or!

Not sure what to do with your old cray­on nubs? Fill a sil­i­cone mold with them and heat them in the oven – this cre­ates new mul­ti­col­ored crayons!

Process de­scrip­tion

The con­tact lens so­lu­tion binds the glue mol­e­cules to each oth­er. The re­sult­ing mass glues the grains of sand to­geth­er, cre­at­ing a ki­net­ic sand that crum­bles in your hands, but keeps its shape per­fect­ly if you mold it into fig­urines!

Once they en­counter the glue, the salt crys­tals leave many mi­crochan­nels be­tween them. Wa­ter fills them all, car­ry­ing the paint with it and dec­o­rat­ing the in­scrip­tion!

Wax con­sists of mol­e­cules that are rel­a­tive­ly weak­ly at­tract­ed to each oth­er. As a re­sult, its melt­ing point is only 40°C. There­fore, the wax crayons melt eas­i­ly and form new ones!

Sim­i­lar ex­per­i­ments are in­clud­ed in the “Art Lab” set from the MEL Sci­ence sub­scrip­tion.

Try it