Red, White, and Blue Density Tower Sensory Bottle

The 4th of July is coming up soon which means it’s time for cookouts, fireworks, and flying all those American flags. This is a red, white, and blue density tower and sensory bottle so your little one can help celebrate at that family cookout with a cool and science-filled sensory bottle.

I love sensory bottles there are infinite possibilities of things that you can put in them. They are amazingly versatile and so helpful for our kiddos to help them calm down. Or if they are just needing to relax. Both my girls love sensory bottles as we have tons of them. Before I even knew that my oldest had sensory issues or was diagnosed with autism we had them. Since they are just cool things that help you calm down. No matter if you are neurotypical or neurodiverse.

So let’s talk about the science of this. A density tower demonstrates density in liquids. A lot of sensory bottles demonstrate this with oil and water. It creates a kind of lava lamp effect when you shake the bottle. These three liquids are all at different densities so they are going to create layers.

Density is the degree of compactness of a substance. The less-dense a liquid is from another it will situate itself on top of the more dense liquid. So water is denser than vegetable oil. Because of that, it will situate itself above the water. If you shake it there will be a temporary mixture but it will go back to being situated by density.

Item	Density (g/ cm³)
Blue Dish Soap	1.06
Vegetable Oil	0.93
Rubbing Alcohol	0.78

Materials

• Blue Dish Soap
• Rubbing Alcohol
• Vegetable Oil
• Red food coloring
• Water bottle with a wide mouth (Voss, core)

Directions

1. Mix the red food coloring with the alcohol.
2. Line up your liquids according to density. The blue dish soap, vegetable oil, and red-colored rubbing alcohol. All of them must be the same amount if there is more volume of one liquid over the other this will not work correctly.
3. Add the colors to the bottle according to density.

If you would like to experiment with your kiddos find household objects that you can test and hypothesize what will happen. Some good ones are ping pong balls, paper, marbles, or rocks. Place your objects in the density tower and see how dense the object is according to the density of the liquid in the tower. Does it sink or float? If it floats, at what layer? Or, you can try to see if you can shake up the different items and make them come together (emulsify).

If your children are younger you can skip all the science and experimentation and just enjoy watching the red, white, and blue density tower colors mix and then separate. If you would like to put something in it to watch it go through or on top of the layers you can add that. Just look at the density of the object compared to the liquids and you will see it float on top of it.

If you make this red, white, and blue density and sensory bottle let me know how it goes! You can do that in the comments below or you can tag @mamaofthedrama at any of your favorite social media websites. So hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss it!

Until next time…

Edit: My children proved that you can mix this until it doesn’t go back to its different layers. If you just gently roll it back and forth it will mix and then separate again.