Mom Moments

This was a cheap and easy craft inspired by another blog.

Supplies needed:

• mason jars with lids (or empty pickle or mayonaise jars with labels soaked off)
• water
• liquid food coloring
• clear hair gel and/or clear shampoo (cheap tip: from the dollar store)
• oil (vegetable or baby oil)
• assorted Halloween items (small rats, spiders, eyeballs, skulls, bugs)

Tips:

• Determine if objects float!  If they do, put them in the gel or shampoo so they don’t rise to the top.  (See frogs floating in the jar on the far left of the top row!)
• A thin layer of oil makes a nice effect for some of the water jars.  (See jar on the far right, bottom row.)
• If using gel or shampoo, layer the objects so you don’t have to push them down.
• With the gel, putting in some and then one drop of food coloring, then more gel, and another drop of food coloring and don’t mix but a very light stir makes for an awesome effect (see skull jar).
• For teens or adults, this link has some much scarier and creepier specimen jars.
• Martha Stewart has some jars using foods, but obviously those wouldn’t be able to be saved for next year.

**IF** you wanted to make this educational for the little ones…

• experiment beforehand with what floats (buoyancy)
• mixing food coloring (color wheel)
• pouring and measuring water
• drops of food coloring and items in each jar (counting)
• how many jars to make if they are to be stacked (even/odd numbers)
• differences between shampoo, gel, water, oil (consistency)
• determine how many mason jars you can fill per bottle of gel/shampoo (math)