Fun with dish soap

One day earlier this month Taipan was looking for something to do, and I suggested a number of things, none of which he really wanted. He eventually found something to do, but I was kicking myself for not pulling out some of our cool books with ideas of things to do - things that are new and interesting that I'm pretty sure would have fit the bill that afternoon. So I got the book out (belatedly), and suggested we try one of the experiments.

The one we did was about surface tension (though we didn't discuss that at all). In a bowl we put water and sprinkled pepper in it, then dipped a toothpick in dish soap and put the tip in the pepper water. The pepper all moves to the edge of the bowl. Then we did the same thing with food coloring in milk, and created some cool swirl effects (not any great pics of that). Taipan and Simi thought it was pretty cool, and each repeated them 3 or 4 times.