colour experiment | Today We Did

I kept seeing this Skittles experiment popping up on my Facebook feed. It was pretty simple, cheap, and quite entertaining.

We just arranged Skittles around the edge of a small white plate and then added some water, until it was touching all of the Skittles. Over a period of a few minutes, the colours of the Skittles slowly bled towards the centre of the plate.

Colour starting to bleed.

Closer to the centre.

If left long enough, the colours began to mix together. Most of our attempts ended with T1 or T2 shaking the plate and making the colours swirl together, or knocking the plate over completely. Luckily we had plenty of Skittles.

You can see from the pictures that the centre of our colour wheel wasn’t quite at the centre of the plate. I think this happened because we were using a plastic plate and it didn’t sit completely flat.

Almost meeting at the centre.

Colourful wheel.

This was easily reproducible and the kids enjoyed doing it. They also ate the used Skittles once we were done!

Food colouring.

A and I got talking about colours today, and how some colours can be mixed with others to make new colours. We spoke about the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. I asked A what she thought would happen if we mixed two of the primary colours together. She wasn’t sure, so we went out to the kitchen and did a little experiment.

We used food colouring in water. I filled three small cups with water, and then let A use some plastic pipettes to squeeze some food colouring into the water. She placed red food colouring into one cup, blue into one and yellow into one. She mixed the colour into the water with a spoon.

Adding blue to yellow to make green.

Then to the cup containing yellow water, she added some blue colouring. She mixed it up and was delighted to see that she had made green water.

Before squirting some yellow dye into the red cup, A accurately predicted that it would make orange. She was very pleased to see that it was indeed orange once she’d mixed it in.

Adding red food colouring to the blue water.

Finally, to the blue cup A added some red food colouring. She had no idea what colour these two would produce, though she hazarded a guess of pink. As these colours are so dark, it was a little hard to see what had happened, until A lifted some of the water out of the cup with the spoon. She broke out with a huge grin when she saw the water had turned purple. It was very exciting for her.

This was a very quick and easy way of showing A how the primary colours mix to make the secondary colours. And it was fun 🙂