After ohhing and ahhing and wishing and dreaming every time we read a post from an American blogger, this week we discovered you can get hold of. An order was placed, the water beads arrived and we were ready to play!

Water beads are a super sensory material and versatile in lots of play but as they were a brand new material to the children (and me) our first playtime was all about exploring and discovering: time for some water bead science.

Water bead science experiment

Our approach to science is the same as all our activities, with a focus on play, creativity and letting the children discover things for themselves. I’m around to provide materials and prompt conversation but I try to let the children ask their own questions and work out their own answers as much as possible. This is quite different to how I remember science being taught at my school, where every experiment was strictly controlled, everyone did exactly the same thing and if you didn’t get exactly the same results at the end then your experiment was wrong. Surely science should be all about trialling, observing and things going wrong leading to new discoveries? That’s the way we roll in our house any way.

With this playful approach to science, here’s what we observed and discovered in our water bead science experiment.