I love to mix stuff up - sometimes I like to go into the kitchen, grab some ingredients and put them together just to see what happens. It's kinda like we're making magic potions. 

When you mix stuff together, sometimes you'll notice that interesting things start to happen. For example, sometimes one of the ingredients might seem to disappear. And at other times, the ingredients just kinda hang out together, and don't really mix up.

So when we mix things together, we can pretend we're making potions but what we're really doing is better than magic - it's Science! Let's try to make a few pretend potions and see what we can learn about them.

For our first mixture, all you'll need is a clear container, a spoon, some water and some play sand. Fill the container with water. Water is a great start to any potion. Now, put a big spoon of sand into the container and mix it around.

What do you see? What's happening? When you mix the sand and the water really fast, the sand spreads out in the glass pretty evenly. You can see the sand floating around in the water. But once you stop stirring and you wait just a few seconds, what happens? The sand settles to the bottom of the container. The sand and the water separate.

So what kind of potion did we make? We made something called a suspension. In a suspension, the ingredients that you mix together can be separated from each other once they've been mixed. Often when you let your mixture sit, the heavier ingredients will fall to the bottom of the container like our sand did. And if you poured your mixture through a filter like a paper towel or a coffee filter, you could separate the sand from the water!

Let's try it! You can see that the water falls into the glass while the sand stays on the filter. You've unmixed your potion!

Now let's try a different kind of a potion. We can use water again but  this time, instead of adding sand, let's add a few spoonfuls of sugar. Mix the sugar around with a spoon like you did with the sand.

What's going on? The sugar is small and grainy like the sand, and at first it might seem like we're making another suspension but keep stirring. What's happening now?

Whoa! It looks like the sugar is totally disappearing into the water but it didn't actually disappear. You can see for yourself if you take a sip of our potion... it tastes sweet! The sugar is still in there but you can't see it anymore. That's because in the water, the sugar dissolves or breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until it gets mixed into the water evenly. This kind of potion is called a solution.

Solutions are mixed together totally evenly and they can't be unmixed. Even if you let the glass of water stand still for a long time, the sugar won't settle to the bottom. If you wanted to try and filter the sugar out like the sand, all of it would just pour right through.

Now let's make another couple of potions, and based on what we've learned, let's see if we can figure out if it's a suspension of a solution. This time, instead of an open container, we'll put a lid on so we can mix things up really well.

Pour some water into the jar until it's about halfway full. Then, add a few drops of food coloring, any color that you'd like. Now, cover up your jar and shake it up! What happened to the food coloring? The coloring is mixed up and if you let the jar sit... the coloring doesn't settle to the bottom. Since the ingredients don't separate, it must be a... solution!

Next, we'll add a totally new ingredient: oil! You can use vegetable oil or olive oil. Put some into the jar, and then put the lid on. And now... shake! Shake your jar all over the place, try and mix the water and oil together. When we set the jar down, what happens? Look! The oil forms big globs in the water, and after you let it set, the oil and water totally separate. What kind of potion do you think this is? If you said suspension, you're right!

So now you know two kinds of mixtures you can make: suspensions, where the ingredients combine together, but can separate again; and solutions, where one ingredient dissolves, or breaks up into teeny tiny pieces, into the other, and solutions can't be separated.

Keep mixing stuff together, and let us know what kinds of cool potions you make. Thanks for joining us today, and I'd also like to give a big thank you to Google Making Science for helping us make this episode. Do you have an experiment you'd like to share? Or do you have a question about anything at all? We'd love to hear from you. Grab a grown-up and leave a comment down below, or send us an email to kids@thescishow.com, and we'll see you next time, here at the fort.