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Looking for a fun and easy St. Patrick’s Day activity for kids? This St. Patrick’s Day science experiment is a take on the classic baking soda & vinegar experiment is a great activity for toddlers, preschoolers and even school aged kids! The best part? You can do it easily right at home! Plus a free printable worksheet, perfect for teaching and discussing the experiment with your kids!
I never intended for this to be a kids’ craft and activities only blog. But, if I go back through old posts, it seems like that’s what we’re talking about over here and I’m not totally mad about it.
I’m not that surprised either. Live Well Play Together has always been a place for me to share my own journey through motherhood and much of that right now is toddler-friendly activities.
Don’t worry though, I’ve got lots of fun motherhood posts coming up, and even a couple travel posts as we start planning our spring and summer travel.
Until then, I’m sharing what we’re up to. And that is toddler and preschool activities.
Little will be 2.5 this month and I often find myself trying to keep up and come up with activities that will keep him challenged and engaged. I got the original idea for this classic baking soda and vinegar experiment here and decided to mix it up a little to go with our St. Patrick’s Day theme to create “Leprechaun Sand”.
Little likes to help me in the kitchen when he can, but we hadn’t done any sort of “experiment” before so he was excited to try this and it ended up being a lot of fun!
I’ll be honest, this can get a little bit messy. You might want to be sure to let your kids wear an art smock, apron, or just go without a shirt if their immediate reaction to messy hands is to wipe them on their shirts.
Supplies
- A medium sized container to hold the baking soda. I used a shallow metal cake pan, but you could also use a plastic bin just as easily.
- A small bowl for the vinegar
- A dropper for mixing – we used a medicine dropper, but you could also use a straw, or a little squirt bottle just as easily.
- Baking Soda
- Vinegar
- Green Food Coloring
Directions
I encourage you to talk with your child about what is happening during each of these steps to help them understand.
- Fill the bottom of container with baking soda.
- Mix vinegar and food coloring in small bowl.
- Use the dropper to drop vinegar onto the baking soda and watch the reaction. Little ones love this – especially if they’ve never seen it before. Little laughed right out loud when he first saw the bubbles. He then kept saying “a little more” each time he put more vinegar in.
- Continue until most of the baking soda has turned green.
- You want the baking soda to absorb all the vinegar – it should not be runny.
- Now, this is the messy part – use your hand to mix the baking soda and vinegar.
- It will be soft and stick together if you want to form it into balls or “rocks” as we called it since we were making sand.
And that’s it. A great sensory experiment and science lesson!
Take it a Step Further
Below are some questions to wrap up the lesson. You can ask all or only a few of these, and feel free to edit them for your own child depending on how old they are.
Taking time to reflect and talk about the experiment afterwards is a good way to get your little ones thinking through a rough version of the scientific method, even without naming it.
It’s also a great way to practice recall and sequencing. For older children, they may practice writing about what happened or even drawing a picture of it.
Questions to Consider
- What are the supplies that we used for today’s experiment?
- You can even have them describe each ingredient.
- For example, the vinegar is liquid, the baking soda is solid.
- The vinegar has a strong smell. (Not a part of the experiment, but it is an observation.)
- You can even have them describe each ingredient.
- What were the steps that we followed?
- What was the reaction when we mixed the vinegar with the baking soda?
- What is the texture of the leprechaun sand?
- Is it hot or cold?
- Is it soft or hard?
- Is it solid or liquid?
Best of all, I’ve created a worksheet with these questions that you can easily download and print here for FREE!
To find more St. Patrick’activities, see here!
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