Magic Potions - So Much Fun!

The kids earned their Fun Fourth Sunday pretty easily this month because they already knew "He Sent His Son" fairly well to start with, and its a favorite for many of the kids anyway, including mine.  I went to pinterest to find something fun, and came across this Magic Potion idea that I tweaked a bit to work for us.  It was so much fun!  I think I got more excited than some of the kids and it worked perfectly.

This definitely took some prep before, between, and some cleanup after, but so worth it.

First I took three review songs and wrote out the words to each on a dry-erase board.  Key words in each song were written in different colors, two colors for each song.  One song had a mix of green and orange key words, the next one had red and blue, and the third had key words written in purple and pink.

I had 6 clear plastic cups filled about 1/3 with vinegar.  I had 6 metal spoons, and had put drops of food coloring on each, to make the 3 different colors.  I then used a separate spoon to cover each of the colored spoons with a big pile of baking soda.  You want to make sure the food coloring is completely covered up.  I was worried that it would leak through but it didn't.  I had all this on a big cookie sheet with towels on hand to clean up any extra mess.

Each kid I picked would come up and pick a spoon and start stirring it into one of the cups.  The BEST part about this is that because there is so much baking soda and the food coloring is at the bottom, and because the liquid kind of hardens the soda up at the beginning, it takes a bit of stirring for some of the soda to dissolve and the color to come through.  Meanwhile its really fizzing and overflowing, and then finally the color appears.  It was quite suspenseful, and I was just as excited as the kids were!  Once the color came through and the liquid died down, we would erase the words that matched the color, and then sing the song, seeing if they could fill in the blanks.

The only trouble we had is it took a bit of down time to erase all the words, so next time I would have a second kid on hand to start erasing the minute they knew what the color was.  It helps to have big words too, I had to kind of squish mine in, so shorter songs, or one song per color might have been a little better.

Don't forgot you have to re-prep all of this again before Senior Primary comes in, and then clean-up afterwards, you don't want the room smelling like vinegar for too long!