Rainbow Experiments

Like in many countries around the world we are currently staying at home in the midst of the Corona Virus crisis. We have been learning at home and I’ve been teaching online since the 13th March. We are so fortunate to live in a time where there is so much technology available to us and so much online for us to use as learning tools.

Over the past 10 days we have developed a new routine and we have filled it with lots of interesting and fun activities, as well as some school work!

There are plenty of resources and ideas out there.

My son loves science so we have incorporated some science activities into our days and I’ll start with those.

We started with a simple Dancing Milk experiment. We filled a shallow dish with milk and then added some drops of food colouring to the milk, spaced well apart. Finally, we added a little washing up liquid and watched as the drops of food colouring danced across the milk. It didn’t last long but it was fun to watch and the kids enjoyed swirling the colours with cocktail sticks afterwards too.

We also did two experiments with skittles. In the first we made a rainbow on a plate by placing the skittles in a pattern around the edge of the plate and then pouring hot water onto the plate. The hot water dissolved the coating on the skittles and created a beautiful rainbow.

In the second skittles experiment we looked at density. We got 5 glasses and separated the skittles by colour. We placed 10 purple skittles in one glass, 8 green skittles in the next, 6 yellow skittles in another, 4 orange skittles in the fourth and finally 2 red skittles in the final glass. The kids and I discussed which glass had the most sugar in it. They quickly identified the glass with the purple skittles. We then put 2 tablespoons of boiling water into each glass. Like the experiment before this dissolved the coloured shell of the skittles. We then used a syring to slowly drip the coloured water, colour by colour, into a new glass. We started with purple, the most dense due to it having the highest amount of sugar. This was followed by green, then yellow, orange and red. If done too quickly you will end up with a glassful of brown water but, if done slowly, a ‘rainbow’ will appear as the each colour stays separate from the colour below. It looks great!