Walking Water

Kate, Maya and I did a little "walking water" experiment that ran into today from yesterday.  I had seen some ideas on this and decided it would be a fun, easy experiment to try.  (Note fun and easy are right up my alley these days.)

This "walking water" experiment was SO COOL!  It was also a great time of year to be doing it, early March, because we could tie it in with rainbows, rain, how rainbows are made, St. Patty's Day, colors, primary colors, secondary colors, how colors are made, etc.

Cool, right?!

If you do try this experiment, use cheap/lightweight paper towels.  They absorb and let the water "walk" to the other cups a lot quicker than heavy duty paper towels that actually absorb the water and keep it in its spot.

Here we go:

First, set up seven clear plastic cups.

Next, add water and food coloring in primary colors to every OTHER cup:
RED - empty cup - YELLOW - empty cup - BLUE - empty cup - RED

I put two dots of the colors we were going to be mixing on
little white cards for Kate to mix to set up some hypotheses of
what we thought the empty cup colors would turn.

Two dots like so.

Then we placed our hypothesis color cards in front of all of our cups.
On the cups with water in them already, I gave her a solid dot of
that color to paint with.

Then we folded and added our lightweight paper towels to each
cup and let them sit.

While we were waiting, we played tricks on the dog...

When we checked just over an hour later, we were already seeing
some progress!

So we let the cups sit and painted in our bathing suit.

Then played on the steps with Snoopy by sliding
him down the railing and throwing him back to the top.
Shhh, don't tell Daddy.

By middday, we were seeing some serious color definition and
by every definition of the experiment, we were complete.  But we
let ours sit for a bit longer to let our rainbow continue walking.

So we played outside... 

...and had a singing contest in our cucumber
microphone.

Kate thought this was the funniest thing!

8 hours later and we we got to really see the complete rainbow
and our hypotheses were correct!  #gofigure

We let the rainbow sit over night to see if there were any differences
but, alas, it looked pretty similar to 12 hours before.

Kate really liked this little project and has been talking about "mixing" colors and what they make since.  I love that we can have fun together and learn while we're at it without putting so much pressure on strictly learning.  It's just so important.  I also love that this was a simple project!