Color Mixing Activity for Preschoolers: Green, Orange and Purple

Vito is 34 months old.
After exploring colour shades and tints, we moved on to learning secondary colours.  We have a few books on colours but this book Colours My First Discovery Book got Vito hooked.  It’s the only book he ever cared about when were discussing colours.  I highly recommend this book for kids ages 1.5 years and older.  My first attempt of showing him the blue and yellow makes green was using tempera paints, but it was short lived.  His attention span was about 5 minutes and after that he wasn’t interested anymore.  So I went back to the one activity that he loves: colour mixing using water.

This activity is actually called The Walking Water Experiment and you might have seen this a lot of times in other homeschooler blogs or in Pinterest. I was hesitant to do this activity because of the water bottles that I needed to prepare.  I don’t have enough glass bottles at home (and storage!) so I purchased a few of these tiny craft bottles from a local shop (they’re made of glass) for this purpose and I realized that they’re quite a gem! I can use them for smelling activities as well as placing specimens from nature finds.   Anyway, going back, you can find similar materials in Amazon, though I’m not sure they have glasses.
 
The set-up is very simple. Just mix water with blue, red and yellow food colouring or you can purchase liquid water colour right away but these are not available here in Ireland.  Leave 3 bottles empty and arrange them as seen on the picture below.  Cut out strips of kitchen towels, these will be the medium in which the water will “walk”.   Place one end in any of the coloured bottle, and the other end in the bottle next to it.

Then, observe!  In just a few seconds/minutes, the water will “walk”.

The top view of the water “walking” through the kitchen towel.  As you can see, the towels in red-yellow-blue were instantly moving, but the red-blue were stalled.  This kept me wondering what was the factor that kept the movement of the water between these colours slow? Any idea?

And they started to drip and mix colours! They were a sight to behold! The kids were so amazed.

Vito started identifying the new colours formed! He’s like “look Mom, there’s green!”. He wouldn’t be like this if we were using paints, but with water play, he’s all into it.

We kept this for the entire afternoon and he asked if we could play “colours” again, which was great.  And now, the cleanup wasn’t that bad either.  Since the bottles were small, they’re so easy to tidy up afterwards.  The activity was a great success! Why don’t you try it too!
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