It’s summertime and the living is easy… until a kiddo comes up to you complaining that he is bored.
Today, I’m sharing one of our tried and true boredom busting strategies: big bubbles.
Beat Boredom With Big Bubbles
In past years, I’ve tried various big bubble recipes. Some were okay, some were big flops. This recipe is fantastic. It was given to us by a beloved teacher last summer. When I first looked at the ingredient list I thought to myself, “Where on Earth do I get that?!” but then I remembered my good friend Amazon and in two days I was good to go.
I can assure you, these ingredients are worth the search and will last for a long time. We make these bubbles all the time–in large quantities–and we have yet to run out of anything other than the dish soap!
I’ll often make a gigantic batch. I’ll ask the kids to quintuple the recipe (hello stealth summer learning!) and we store it in a big Rubbermaid container on our patio. Boom! Bubbles galore!
Beat boredom with this recipe:
- 1 tsp (or even a smidgen more) guar gum powder
- 1 tsp 91% rubbing alcohol
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp citric acid
- 1/2 cup + 1 1/2 TBSP Dawn Ultra dish liquid (make sure it’s the blue Dawn Ultra- this is important!)
- 15 1/2 cups VERY WARM water
- Mix the guar gum powder, rubbing alcohol, baking soda, and citric acid together. Make sure you mix it very well until it is thick like cement.
- Add the water to the mixture. Make sure that the water is VERY WARM. Stir until dissolved.
- Add the Dawn Ultra and stir until dissolved.
- Enjoy!
What about the wands?
We have tried them all! Last summer, we had a blast creating our own wands. We used our imagination, and Pinterest, to create our very own Wand STEM Challenge. That was a lot of fun, but most of our wands fell apart after a while. You can see some of our attempts in this video:
Once I realized that we’d be making these big bubbles all the time, I invested in three of these wands. We have had them since the very end of last summer and they are still going strong!
Now that I’ve shared our family’s favorite boredom-busting strategy, I’d love to hear yours! Share here!
Thanks so much for this! We’ve just made out first batch and the bubbles were awesome.
Due to my inability to read we mixed all the non-water ingredients into a sticky paste first. It still seemed to work fine.
Quick question – you say it’s important to use the Blue Dawn Ultra, but you don’t day why. Any particular reason? Living in the UK, I used a Proctor and Gamble equivalent- Fairy Liquid, which is probably the same stuff, only green.
Hi Robin!
So glad that it worked for you!
The fantastic teacher who shared this recipe with me last summer told me blue Dawn only. I’ve since run out of blue Dawn on a few occasions and tried other brands and the results have not been as successful. I don’t have a reason why, but I know blue Dawn works!