Water beads start out as tiny little balls. I soaked them in water all night long. I did one bowl of pink and one bowl of clear.
The next morning, this is what I found! They grew by about 20 times their starting size! Now for the magic!
I put a bowl of clear water beads in a glass dish and placed it on top of a picture. We all looked in the bowl and drew a picture of what we saw. Some of the descriptions were awesome! They saw "bubbles", "marbles", "mirrors"
This is how they looked!
We slowly poured water into the bowl of clear water beads and all of a sudden, the picture of a fish appeard! It was just like magic!
It was so cool we just HAD to demonstrate it for our 6th grade reading buddies! Little did they know they were learning about refraction! They thought they were just playing! :)
A short explanation: Because the clear water beads are clear, they refract or bend the light in the same way as the water. When it was just the beads in the bowl we were looking through light that was being bent in all different directions because of the ball shape of the beads. Once we poured in the water, we filled in all those empty areas and just like magic we could see the image.
Okay, it is much more scientific than that but it was sure a lot of fun!!
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