Make a Hurricane in a Jar

We were on holidays last week, and our destination was the East Coast of Canada for a wonderful, beach-filled, sun-drenched week! However, Mother Nature had other plans.

Hurricane Arthur hit the East Coast of the USA and worked its way North – just in time to cancel our flight out of Toronto to Prince Edward Island.*This post contains Amazon Affiliates Links. Please see our full Disclosure Policy here.

After a few days of prepping my son for his first airplane flight, it was somewhat difficult to explain to him why we were going to have to wait a day or two more to begin our holiday.

Thankfully, in the end, our flight was only delayed one day and we had a fantastic “almost-week” of beach-filled, sun-drenched holiday.  My son, however, began to be curious about what a hurricane was and so I decided to do a little project with him that would help explain!

After reading The Magic School Bus Inside A Hurricane (one of our very favourite Science series!), Onetime (my almost 3 year old son), had a pretty good understanding of the storm that had delayed our flight.

Then we gathered our materials for a Hurricane jar!

Hurricane Supplies

• a glass jar
• some soap that contains Glycol Stearate (we used Softsoap brand – has to be the opaque kind, not the transparent type)
• water
• food colouring is optional

How to Make a Hurricane

All you do is fill the jar up to approximately 1/4 to 1/3 full of soap, then add water to fill up the rest of the space.

When the water gets to the top, keep it running until all the bubbles overflow and are gone.

If you want to add colour, drop maybe 1 or 2 drops of food colouring into your jar.  Screw the cap on tightly and SHAKE!

We played around with turning the jar upside down and shaking it from side to side.  The liquid inside looks like a hurricane if you get it spinning!  It’s so hard to capture how COOL this is with only photos.

Different colours could create different kinds of jars.  Red could be lava.  Green could be a stormy sea.  Pink or orange could be a cloudy swirly sunset.

It might be fun to add glitter or small objects too to the jar and see what might happen. We’ll have to try that. (Update: We tried glitter and it looks awesome! Check out our magic sparkles calming jar.)

In the end, after all the fun, you can use the soapy water to wash your hands. Just be sure to only add a few drops of food colouring if you want to do this.

That’s it for our Hurricane Jar! If you like this activity, you may also want to check out our Hopping Corn science activity as well.If you’re interested in finding even more simple science experiments and activities for young children, check out our SCIENCE ACTIVITIES page.Follow One Time Through’s board Science Activities for Kids on Pinterest.

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Happy Hurricaning!