Posted by Nicole Carney on Mar 15, 2013 in Science Activities, St. Patrick's Day | 0 comments

Last night, the boys helped me make green sugar cookies for St. Patrick’s Day.

Here’s M adding green food colouring, and mixing up the cookie dough and icing:

      

When the cookies were done baking, and had a chance to cool off,  the boys started decorating using the icing, icing sugar, and some green sprinkles:

  

Then came the taste test. According to M, they turned out “Delicious!”

  

This morning, when the boys came downstairs for breakfast, they saw this:

Tiny green footprints leading to a tray of the boys’ cookies, with a message scribbled on three of them. The message reads, “Catch me if you can!” M immediately knew who was responsible; that sneaky little leprechaun was at it again! So far we haven’t been able to catch him using the leprechaun trap M made, but we haven’t given up hope yet!

Colour Mixing Experiment

M and I have done colour mixing with paint and ice cubes in the past, but this time I thought it would be fun to conduct a colour mixing experiment in a different way.

For this experiment, we used:

• three glasses
• blue food colouring
• yellow food colouring
• paper towel
• water

To set up this experiment I had M add a few drops of blue food colouring to one glass of water, and a few drops of yellow food colouring to another glass of water. We left the third glass dry and empty.

  

Next, we tore off some paper towel, rolled it up, and stuck one end in the blue water, and the other end in the dry, empty glass. Then we did the same thing using the yellow glass of water and the empty glass.

When I asked M what he thought was going to happen he was stumped, so I told him to keep watching the paper towel and the middle glass closely. At first, not a lot happened, but then M started to notice the blue and yellow colours traveling up the paper towel. I explained to him that the paper towel is sucking up the water like a straw but, at this point, the middle glass remained empty. M went to play for a bit and, after about an hour had passed, we checked in on our experiment and noticed this:

The yellow water and the blue water continued to be absorbed by the paper towel, but they had traveled even further. Once the paper towels became saturated, they dispensed the coloured water into the middle glass and created a completely new colour: green!

We decided to give our experiment a couple more hours to see if any more changes would occur. When we came back we discovered there had been more changes! M observed that the middle glass, which was once empty, now had the same amount of coloured water as the other two glasses, only its water was green. I asked him where the green water had come from and he said, “from this yellow cup, and the blue cup”.

I gave M a piece of paper and some markers and asked him to draw what happened in the experiment. When he was finished drawing, I asked him what his picture showed, and I recorded what he said beneath his drawing.

This experiment was easy and effective. The only thing I wish I had done differently was to have M draw a picture (while I recorded his initial hypothesis and observations) before, during, and at the end of the experiment to show his entire thought process. Oh well, hopefully I’ll remember to do this for our future science experiments!

And that’s how I kept my bugs busy today! Feel free to check out more of our science experiments and St. Patrick’s Day activities while you’re here :).

Thanks for visiting!

Share!

Follow!