Exploding Tic Tac Toe Cooperative Races
We are well into summer which means the regular kind of cool activities are no longer cutting it. I’m having to up my game.
A few years ago I did a bunch of activities featuring water and I thought I wanted to do more like that. Well, the activity morphed beyond water play, but it is how it started.
So I wanted something where they could run, work together, and it had to be FUN. It would take me quite awhile to piece together how this came about because it was not smooth at all. But it was totally worth it.
Exploding Tic Tac Toe Cooperative Races.
I bought a bunch of cheap throwaway bowls. First I added 10 drops of food coloring in the bottom of 9 bowls (10 was plenty! 5 would have worked, I’m sure). I did 5 pinkish and 4 bluish. Then I covered the food coloring with baking soda (Missed a bit on this one, but the rest you couldn’t tell what color it was)
Next we set them up in 3 rows of 3. They were set out at random and no one knew what color was where. We filled up two water bottles with vinegar (We used ones with a nice little spout so we could shoot the vinegar, not just pour)
Getting ready. I wanted them to run back and forth. Royal and Logi-Bear ended up over on this side but they were keeping the dogs out of the baking soda.
And go! I had them choose a bowl before they ran over (to prevent them from just picking the right colors). The goal was to get a tic tac toe in as few turns as possible. I didn’t want them rooting for one color over another and then competing instead of cooperating.
There was a very satisfying volcano of color after every turn.
In the end, purple won it!! We did end up exploding the rest of the bowls and it turns out blue never could have won. Whoops! I think next time I will make sure there is a possibility for both colors to win.
The boys loved this activity and it got them moving for a bit.
For more great summer activity ideas, check out these posts:
