Now that Valentine’s day is over my house is overflowing with candy from the kids. In efforts to avoid the impending candy rush that is bound to happen as soon as my kids figure out where I have hidden the candy, we have started doing various science experiments and projects using our candy. Who said you had to eat it anyways?! These Conversation Heart Watercolors have created a fantastic paint and kept my kids occupied and creating for quite some time!
This project originally started out as a science experiment that we did last year. When we revisited Dissolving Candy Hearts my kids ended up taking the experiment in a different direction once their hearts had fully “melted”. Knowing that my kids wanted to make a watercolor paint with their hearts, we did change up some of it ahead of time. Make sure to visit our science experiment on Melting Hearts to expand on this activity with!
Items Needed for Conversation Heart Watercolors
)
)
The mallet is not an absolute necessity, but my kids sure did have a blast with it!
How to Make Conversation Heart Watercolors
To start my kids attempted to break up the conversation hearts with the mallet. This took so long it actually became an activity in itself (which I do plan on blogging about and sharing why hammering activities such as this are beneficial to kids). Sad to say though we had no luck getting our conversation hearts to break. I do think if we were using the smaller ones it would have worked.
Once they gave that a good and honest try we sorted the hearts into different jars and filled the jars with water.
They looked so pretty on our window! While we waited for them to dissolve one of the kids made the observation that they did not think their paint would turn out super vibrant so we added in one drop of food dye to each container (except the purple and orange got two for color mixing sake).
At this point, the hearts had already started to dissolve so the solution was fairly dense. It created a really neat slow-motion effect when the food dye dropped into the containers. So pretty!
Once fully dissolved the water was no longer opaque and there was quite a bit of foam on top.
I was slightly worried about how the foam would affect the paint, but it resulted in a nice glossy color!
The kids had a lot of fun painting the white conversation hearts and just plain paper.
They loved the smell and thought it was pretty funny to be painting with candy!
The color didn’t dry very vibrant, but it was definitely a fun process art activity.
We had a lot of fun with this! Now, I didn’t think of this until we had already dumped ours out, but once you are done painting use your candy paints to make play dough or a sensory soup! To make your conversation heart watercolors into playdough simply use our easy playdough recipe and subout the cup of water for a cup of your candy watercolors! If you don’t have a cup worth left just add in some additional water as needed.
If your family makes these Conversation Heart Watercolors we would love to see the fun! Tag us on Facebook with @Parenting Chaos or on Instagram with #ParentingChaos!