Dear Reader,
I know, “Magic Milk” is kind of an old hat, but when I was browsing through activities, my preschooler begged me to see it. I decided it was all over the internet enough that I wasn’t going to post about it, but the first time we did it was not enough. She has begged me to do Magic Milk every day for a week since our first time so I decided if she loved it that much, I’d actually count it as an activity.
In case you haven’t heard of magic milk, it’s pretty simple. you pour just enough milk on a plate to cover the dish-like portion of the plate (aka pick a plate with a lip or a raised edge), add drops of food coloring to the milk (don’t mix it in. We chose red, green, lime green, blue, and teal. And by we, I mean my preschooler), take a toothpick and dip it in dish soap (that toothpick is now “magical”), and hand it to your kiddo, and let them touch the milk with it.
p.s. I added too much milk. If I had poured less, the lime green color would have stayed closer to the top of the milk. It still mixed in, though, so besides the fact that I wasted a little milk, it wasn’t really a big deal.
If I understand it right, the fat of the milk likes the soap, so it tries to get to the soap and pushed the watery contents away in an effort to get to the soap. I’m guessing that is why soap gets things clean… it bonds with the fats so that they come off the plate.
Preschoolers don’t really care about the science of it, yet, but they do think it’s pretty fun to do. And bonus point: working with toothpicks helps pincer grasp! In case you haven’t noticed, we work a lot on pincer grasp at our house… and if you have looked into it, you might notice that we need more work because my preschooler is still holding things at the stage below where she is supposed to be (with a backward hand hold instead of the pincer).
I’m sure we will do this activity again. I know it wastes milk, but if you’re the type that milk actually has time to go bad (my type before I had 3 growing young’uns) then it’s not wasting, it’s recycling. And if you’re the type that I am now, you’re buying so much milk that you don’t really notice the difference.
