The Color Mixing Lab

Over the past couple of weeks we have been enjoying our Color Mixing Lab at school.

It started when I set up an invitation to explore with test tubes, pipettes, water, and food coloring for my afternoon kids.  Right away the questions started coming..

"What is that?"

"What are we doing?"

"Can I use the food coloring?"

A good sign to see the children so excited.  I had wanted to start this with a small group so that when I did it with our larger morning group, I would have an idea of what to expect.

Each child got to choose a color to add to the small containers of water.

Using pipettes the children added a little water to their test tubes to begin.

Then the color mixing began and the exclamations of joy and wonder.

I could tell right away everyone, both afternoon and morning groups were going to enjoy this exploration, and I was not wrong. 

When they would make a new color the thrill of it was hard for them to contain.  I could not move my head fast enough in order to catch all the exclamations of "look at my color!!!"

Showing off "root beer" as they were calling this color which started everyone making
 "root beer."



Some of the many colors mixed.

Next part of the exploration was looking at the colors on the light box, which really showed off the colors they mixed in Color Mixing Lab.

I can tell we will be doing different variations of this for many more times to come, I will keep you posted ;)

Here is an example of our color mixing conversations:

"Mine looks like root beer."-E
"I like all the colors, even pink."-T
"I love pink." -E
"I wonder if you can mix all the colors and a lot of water?"-T
"What do you think will happen?"-Me
"I don't know?"-T
"Would you like to give it a try?"- Me
"Yeah...a little water, a little yellow, a little more yellow, and a little more, ooh a little more red...aha, nice color."-T
"I did all of mine, look at my colors."-E
"I want to do this everyday!"-M