National Bubble Week Starts March 20th

Spring is coming and National Bubble Week is March 20 to March 26! Coinciding with the 1st day of spring, which is on March 20th, there is actually, really, a holiday on which it's your job to blow bubbles! Started in 2000 by a company called Oddzon. Oddzon is a subsidiary of toymaker Hasbro, and is the maker of Koosh Bubbles. They also make bubble guns and bubble whistles, and their products can be found on the shelves of toy departments, just waiting for you to celebrate National Bubble Week.

Believe it or not, there are several bubble categories in the Guinness Book of World Records. Most People in a Bubble, Largest Free-Floating Soap Bubble, Largest Bubble Wall, and more! Maybe in honor of National Bubble Week, you can try to break one of them! It's going to be a hard task though; the people with these records obviously put a lot of time into them. The records can be found here.

Get everyone you know in the mood for National Bubble Week too by sending some E-cards. I found some cute ones at all-yours.net and I'm sure you can find more, too. Other ways to participate might be as simple as taking your kids out to blow bubbles, have bubble gum, taking your friends out, taking a bubble bath. Maybe you can even convince someone else to do the dishes! Here is a page full of different bubble activities, focused mainly on kids.

National Bubble Week can also be an opportunity to talk about science. Everyone's noticed how bubbles get those swirly, pretty colors in them. But the colors have science behind them. When light goes into the soap that makes a bubble, it's refracted. That means the vibration of the light waves is changed, and so it shows strange colors. For an experiment, let your soap bubble hang from the wand. Watch the top. As it grows more thin (assuming it's a large bubble) the color will seem to move to the bottom, and the top will get more clear until it pops. More information on the colors in soap bubbles can be found here.

So go outside, blow some bubbles, and have some fun! Here is a recipe for bubbles, if you don't want to buy any - you will still need a wand though.

2/3 cup dishwashing soap
1 gallon water
2 to 3 tablespoons of glycerin (available in pharmacies or chemical supply houses)

Happy National Bubble Week!