Valentine’s Love Potion Activity & Gift Idea for Kids

If your toddler is anything like mine, playing with water never gets old — he’s always looking for an excuse to make a mess explore with liquids and powders any chance he can.

So I figured it would be so much fun for him to experiment even more with a love potion play activity for Valentine’s Day!

I’ve seen so many creative science ideas involving baking soda and vinegar to create volcanic-like reactions, so figured that was just what the kid needed after being cooped in all day. We would just add red Kool-Aid to make it work for Valentine’s Day!

Materials

• Baking Soda
• Vinegar
• Water
• Kool-Aid Packets (Red or any other colors/flavors)
• 4-6 containers or cups (I used plastic cups and tubes that I no longer needed from storing breast milk!)
• Spoons, pipettes or other instruments for mixing

Step 1: Place several cups, containers and utensils out so your kid can experiment like a little scientist. You’ll want to separate each ingredient into containers for easy pouring: one for baking soda + Kool-Aid mix, one for water and one for vinegar.

We decided to set up in the kitchen this time, since I learned the hard way that the living room was no place for messy water play, despite all efforts to plan for spillage!

Step 2. You can give your kid a basic explanation of what to do with the liquids and powders, but they probably won’t need any explanation once they lay eyes on the glory in front of them ;).

Step 3. Watch the little scientist in action as they pour the water and vinegar into the baking soda and Kool-Aid mixtures. Bubbles will form and the water level will rise to create a potion of love!

My son was so excited to see the chemical reaction taking place in front of him. The spoons and droppers makes for even more fun and practicing fine-motor skills as they transfer liquids from one cup to the other.

Our guy kept asking for more water and powder after each of his “potions” were created. When we ran out of red Kool-Aid we let him try the experiment again with blue and green packets.

Kids can combine the colors for some color-mixing learning too!

This was one of my son’s favorite activities to try and makes a great Valentine’s gift idea and candy alternative!

Just add your favorite Kool-Aid flavor into a test tube (baby food jar works well!) and leave a little Valentine instructions to add water and some baking soda (the ingredients in the Kool-Aid works to make a similar chemical reaction that vinegar creates).

Happy Valentines Day!