Bath Bombs

A few months ago, on a rainy afternoon, we dropped in to a local shop that makes their own bath time goodies and the children were able to have a go at making some bathbombs.  The process was so much easier than I imagined so I thought we'd buy more of the ingredients so that we could have a go at home.

I finally got round to working out the quantities that we'd need (and went rather overboard - we'll be making them as presents for many Christmasses and birthdays to come!) and we had a lovely big box of bath bomb ingredients delivered this week.
We had a go this morning, mixing our potions of sodium bicarb, citric acid and other magical ingedients until we had a mixture roughly the consistency of damp sand.  We made three different colours and fragrances, using child safe essential oils of mandarin, lemon and lime.  Then we packed them tightly into our iced lolly moulds and left to stand for fifteen minutes. 

The hardest part of the whole process was getting them safely back out of the mould. 

We made these for fun, but as with everything, there was much learning to be had too and lots of opportunity to practise skills. That the wet ingredients had to be mixed in very slowly so that they didn't set off the fizzy chemical reaction before the bombs even made it to the bath. That they had to be just the right consistency to not crumble. That plastic's capacity to expand when heated was very helpful in getting the bathbombs back out of the mould.  They got to practise motor skills and dexterity, spooning out the ingredients and stirring quickly without spilling the contents out of the bowl.  They got to be creative in choosing colours and scents that would work well together.  The younger children counted the right number of spoonfulls of ingredients out. The eldest helped to work out which quantities of each ingredient we needed, in order for the ratios to be correct, when we made a different amount than the instructions specified.  They did all this wthout even realising that they were learning.

Of course we had as much fun testing them as we did making them and can confirm that they fizz really well in the bath and smell good enough to eat!