Walking Rainbow – Fun Experiment for Kids

It’s no secret for anyone who reads my blogs or follows me on Instagram, that my elder son loves Rainbows. He loves doing activities that involve rainbow colors. Recently, while looking for some fun activities for him, we came across the Walking Rainbow experiment and decided to give it a try.

This experiment uses basic ingredients available in your kitchen and is very easy to set-up. It’s great to teach them about color mixing, and primary and secondary colors. It take 3-4 days for the complete effect to take place, and will require some patience on the kids’ part.

Materials needed:

Plastic cups – 6 pcs

Water filled in 3 cups,

Kitchen Tissue roll – 6 strips of paper towels, as shown in the picture, and

Food color in 3 basic colors (red, blue and yellow).

To set-up:

Keep the 6 cups in a circle and fill alternate cups with water (upto 3/4th full). Put few drops of Red food color in the 1st cup, Yellow in the 3rd and Blue in the 5th cup. Cut 6 strips of Kitchen paper towels, just long enough to go from one cup to another. Put these paper towels in the cups as shown.

The process:

In 6 hours –

We saw the paper towels absorb the colored water and start changing color. The empty glasses also started getting filled with water in secondary colors.

 

On Day 2 –

On the second day, we could see that the glasses with the secondary colors had filler up a bit more and some of the paper towels had started to absorb the secondary colors too.

On Day 4 –

We could only see substantial change on day 4, when all the glasses were filled with the rainbow colored water equally and the paper towels were colored in the different 6 colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.

I think I had as much fun and was equally anxious to see the changes, as the kids were. It is a must-try activity to do with pre-schoolers, which is a lot of fun and educational too!

 

Please leave me a comment if you like this activity and would like to see more simple activities to be done with your young kids.

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