Preschool and kindergarten kiddos are just naturally curious people! And, they get so excited when they figure out that mixing certain colors together produces new colors! So, all week long we’ve been experimenting with mixing colors, and I want to share our two favorite activities! We mixed play dough together, and we did the Walking Water experiment! Both of them were absolute hits!
Mixing Play Dough
I know, I know! You probably think I’m crazy for actually telling my kiddos to mix play dough together! But, before you completely write off this activity, just hear me out! I gave VERY clear instructions before we did this. They understood that the ONLY time it was OK to mix play dough was right then, at their tables, with the two balls of play dough I gave to them. And we have had ZERO problems with them trying to mix the colors during centers since we did this!
I gave them each two small balls of play dough. They got two pick the two colors from red, yellow, and blue. Then they started squeezing! I wish I had recorded their shrieks of joy and excitement when the new color started to appear! Even though I had shown them what would happen with each combination of colors before they did it on their own, They still couldn’t believe that their play dough did the same thing! And, they were even more excited when I gave each of them a small baggie to put their play dough into so they could take it home! I had to cover my sweet kiddos faces, but here are a couple pictures of them in action!
Walking Water
The other color mixing activity they absolutely loved was called Walking Water! We started by butting water into some clear cups and adding food coloring to color it red, yellow, or blue. We also put an empty cup between each pair of colors.
Just adding the food coloring and watching the water change was exciting enough! They kept saying, “Mrs. A! You’re magic!!” I probably could’ve stopped after that, and they would’ve been perfectly happy. But… We kept going!
Next, we added paper towel strips to the cups so that one end was in the colored water and one end was in the empty cup. They noticed right away that the colored water was already starting to move up each paper towel strip!
Once that was done, the experiment became a waiting game. After a few hours, you could start to see water in the empty middle cups. But, the best part was when we came back the next day! The middle cups now had green, orange, and purple water in them!
The kids were so excited about it that they didn’t want me to take the experiment away! So, I had to promise them I would take pictures of the cups and make a book about our experiment!
If you like these ideas, you’ll definitely want to check out my posts about our plants experiments!
What are your favorite activities for color mixing???
Happy Teaching!
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