Water beads are a blast in your sensory bin, but there are many other ways you can use these magical little orbs! Check out these ingenious water bead activities to get your kids playing and learning, and let us know your ideas in the comments!
*Please note that water beads are not edible! If you have a little one who’s still exploring the world by tasting everything, you can make your own water beads by using food coloring to dye large tapioca pearls. Easy and safe for baby!
Invisible Water Bead Hunt
You can amp up your sensory play by adding slime or shaving cream to your water beads. All three of my little ones are averse to having goo on their hands, so they prefer adding water instead. The super-slippery texture is entrancing! Add clear water beads to a bin or bowl of water and then go hunting for the invisible beads. Use all kinds of scoops, spoons, etc to catch them!
Water Beads for Adding & Subtracting
Most water bead activities involve sensory play, but that’s not all these little wonders are good for! We love using ten-frames to explore addition and subtraction. Water beads are a wonderfully squishy and fun alternative to more traditional math manipulatives. Here we built a ten-frame out of LEGOs so that my kindergartener could use water beads to work out addition problems up to twenty.
Estimation Mastery
Fill any container in your house with water beads and have a competition to see who can come up with the closest estimate. Try with different containers over time and see if you can improve your estimation skills. (For more estimation practice, check out estimation180.com!)
Water Beads for Multiplication Practice
Use a muffin tin and your water beads to create equal groups and explore skip counting and multiplication facts.
Writing Prompts with Water Beads
Water beads have many unique properties that can lead to some fun and engaging writing prompts. Just a few examples:
- Write ten objective statements and ten subjective statements about a water bead.
- Consider a water bead and a marble. Observe their characteristics closely, and make a chart to compare and contrast the two objects. Then do some creative writing based on these prompts (or one of our own).
- A water bead and a marble become friends. Tell a story about the struggles and delights of their friendship. What obstacles do they encounter and how can they overcome them?
- One morning, a marble wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a water bead. Write about what happens next.
- Imagine you are the only marble in a world full of water beads. Write about your life.
- Design an advertisement for water beads. What makes them special, fun, and useful?
Explore Measurement & Volume
Use water beads to compare different objects in your home. You can line them up to measure an object’s length or fill a container to measure its volume. Compare containers of different shapes and make predictions about which will hold more beads.
You can also use a bucket balance to measure the weights of various objects with your water beads!
Light Refraction with Water Beads
Notice how a water bead’s curved shape creates a concentrated point of light. What other objects around your house behave similarly? You can use a magnifying glass and a piece of paper to start a fire. Do you think a water bead will have the same effect?
Can you draw or a paint a water bead and its shadow?
Build Patterns, Series, and Sequences
For preschoolers, you can use water beads to play with the idea of color patterns. With older children, use water beads to illustrate series and sequences. You can even demonstrate fairly sophisticated concepts, such as square and triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, or exponential growth and decay. For example, use water beads and a muffin tin to show exponential growth by putting two beads in the first cup, four in the second, eight in the third, and so on. How far can you get before you have too many beads for the cup to hold? (Hint: Probably not as far as you think!) Now try the powers of three!
Explore Basic Physics
- Predict and draw the trajectory of a bouncing water bead. What forces are acting on the bouncing bead?
- Graph the height of a bouncing bead over time.
- Experiment with bouncing on different surfaces and at different temperatures — compete to see who can create the optimal conditions for a bead to bounce highest/longest.
- Put a small handful of water beads into a deep bowl and swirl it to explore how centrifugal force affects them.
Color Mixing and Color Theory
What happens when you hold a blue water bead over a pink water bead? What other “new” colors can you make by stacking water beads? Keep a chart and use paints to record the combinations you try and the colors you create. Arrange water beads in spectral order. Which colors are supplementary? Which are complementary? How do you know?
Let us know what other ideas you have for using your water beads to learn and play! Comment below with your favorite water bead activities, and have fun!
