Do you know what gets me through my 3 year old not napping? Science. I’ve been wanting to try this walking water rainbow for a long time and the opportunity presented itself this afternoon when I was scrambling to find something productive that a sleepy nap resistant preschooler could do.
Luckily we’ve done an activity like this before here during a Preschool Science Party so I knew how amazing and simple it would be.
What you’ll need: 6 clear plastic cups, 6 strips of paper towels, food coloring, water
How to do it:
- Fill 3 glasses full of water
- Add red, yellow, and blue food coloring so each glass has it’s own dedicated color
- Arrange 3 empty glasses in between the colored water glass
- Add a strip of paper towel to connect the red glass to an empty glass. Then from the empty glass to the yellow glass. Connect all glasses with a paper towel.
What happens:
The water “walks” up the paper towl by capillary action. This is the same way that plants get water from the ground and up through their roots and stems.
We also talked about color theory and how primary colors can mix to form all the other colors. (By the way, I have never seen my kids understand color mixing quicker than they did with this experiment.)
After we watched the colors mix together, I gave them plastic pipettes and let the go to town mixing and playing in the colored water. We found that we could make brown by mixing all the water together. Allie put a cup in the middle and formed brown through capillary action. (That’s my girl!)
So the next time you are frustrated during naptime consider this simple science activity. You’ll be thinking to yourself, “Maybe naptime is overrated.. we can do science instead!”
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