Сontest "Games and Toys" #7 by @papi.mati

Intro

I'm an animator, which means I often work with kids and adults, create games for them, escape rooms, concerts and other events. Even though I don't have my own kids yet, I was working with hundreds of them on several parties, festivals or hotels as Kids Entrepreneurs.

From my experience, each year it's getting more difficult to play with kids as their attention is often redirected to electronic devices: smartphones, tablets, laptops. Each year I can see younger kids with the monitor in front of their eyes. When I was starting to work as the enterpreneur ten years ago, children were spending most of the time on vacation with the other kids, now it takes a lot of work to get their attention and keep it for longer.

There is one "game" which always win with the smartphone though. No matter if kid has 5 or 15 years, all of them loves to make huge soap bubbles. In fact, parents love it as much as children (including me, I enjoy it very much).

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Big soap bubbles

Making big soap bubble is not so difficult and in fact, everyone can do it at home without buying any expensive equipment.

Soap bubbles works better when the day is cloudy, there is no much sun and humidity is high. If it's very dry outside, I would recommend you to wait for another day

_{Click on that picture to see the video on dTube. I'm explaining how to make soap bubbles for RMF.FM - the biggest radio station in Poland (unfortunately Polish only)}

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Make your tool

You will need two sticks and strip of fabric or bandage.
If you are going to make soap bubbles with young child, use plastic sticks. Wooden might be too heavy to keep it up for a long time. Plastic works better in the groups too - excited kids often move fast and might hurt their friends with heavy wooden stick.
Connect both sticks with the strip and then attach another strip to the previous creating "smile" (photo below)

Bigger smile will allow you to make bigger bubbles but I recommend you to start with something relatively small, as it is easier to make smaller soap bubbles.
It's a good idea to make few different versions of tool and use more than one model.

If you want to make many small soap bubbles at the same time, you can create that kind of the tool:

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Prepare the liquid

Now it's time to prepare the liquid.
To do it, you will need only three ingredients:

• small bottle of glycerin (available in every pharmacy)
• 2 litres of water
• 1 litre of dish soap

Mix everything slightly but avoid making foam.

Glycerin makes the soap bubbles more resistant and colourful. It makes it heavier too, so if you will add too much of that ingredients, your bubbles instead of flying away will be falling down. You can experiment with that ingredient - if it's very dry outside, add a bit more of glycerin, if it's humid, start with half of the bottle and later add more if it will be needed.

Water should be in the room temperature or a bit lower. Very cold and hot water is not good for making soup bubbles.

Finally the most important ingredient. Not every dish soap is good for the big bubbles. I have tested several brands available in Poland and the best I have found until now was Fairy (it's not the advertisement, nobody pays me for that 😁). It's international brand so maybe you have it out store too. If not, buy few different kinds of dish soap and make some tests before you will invite your child to play with you.
Unfortunately, price of the dish soap matters. Usually more expensive soap works much better.

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Make the bubbles

Put the liquid in a bowl. Dip the tool in the liquid until a soapy film forms in the opening between the strips of material. Hold the sticks wide and move them slowly to form a bubble. If you want the bubble to fly away, bring the sticks closer together, closing the film.

Tips:

1. make bubbles in your backyard, not at home. Otherwise you will have a lot of cleaning up.
2. The most common mistake of novices is to move the sticks too quickly. Take the bubbles slowly.
3. If you do not close the bubble by putting the sticks together in time, the bubble will burst.
4. Be careful not to fall over. After a few minutes of playing, the floor will be very slippery
5. Do not contaminate the liquid water. If you contaminate it with soil, leaves, grass or anything else, it will be impossible to make bubbles

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Post was prepared for "Games and Toys" contest organized by @strecoza

If you have any question, feel free to ask me. I'll help you with your bubbles as much as I can.

10% of income from this post goes to @adollaraday

@papi.mati