We all really enjoyed a morning of experimenting and fun last week when we made our very own lava lamps. Karen, Gordon ad Mark were our scientists for the morning. We started by watching a short video on You tube which explained how to make the lava lamps successfully.

We followed these instructions carefully and used empty water bottles which we added ¼ bottle of water and ¾ bottle of vegetable oil. After this Gordon and Karen chose a food colouring. Karen chose red, Gordon chose Yellow and Mark chose Blue – they all added their food colouring to their mixture of water and oil. They watched as the food colouring dispersed down through the oil and into the water at the bottom of the bottle.

After this, Karen, Gordon and Mark added the Alka seltzer tablet which was broken into 4 pieces by staff member Jackie. When they put these into the mixture, they observed lovely coloured bubbles dispersing through the water and oil making a lava lamp effect. This was very therapeutic for everyone to watch. Staff member Jenny demonstrated this to all the residents in the room who were watching the experiment. Everyone loved the effect of this.

Once everyone had a look at these bottles, we decided to take them into our multi-sensory room to put them onto our light box. This was such a lovely, relaxing effect which was really nice to watch with some soothing music in the background to end the session.

These lava lamp bottles can be used over and over again which we will all get great enjoyment from using in the future.

Have a look at our photos below to see how we done this fantastic experiment and how much enjoyment everyone had from doing this.