Mad Science Monday: Walking Water Experiment

It's Monday, which around here means it's Mad Science Monday! We're finally delving into our Autumn theme for the month of November. After last week's color mixing explorations as we learned about the story of Noach, I had one more color mixing experiment I wanted to do today. Besides, Autumn is one of Nature's best examples of color mixing in action!

Walking Water Experiment
I've done this experiment over and over again with several groups of preschool students over the years. It's one that is exciting each and every time! This morning while my son ate his breakfast, I set up our Walking Water Station:

I filled three glasses with water and several drops each of red, yellow, and blue food coloring. In between each of the glasses with water, I placed 3 empty glasses. (I've seen some folks fill these with uncolored water as well, but I find that slows the experiment down quite a bit). I cut six strips of paper towel and placed one end of each in each of the cups as pictured above. Immediately you can already see the color travel up the paper towels as they absorb water from each of the cups filled with colored water. The results take a bit longer to see (unless you choose to help it along by squeezing the paper towels to soak up water more quickly). Although this experiment was one that was more observational for my toddler, children can help in the preparation and set-up. 

After a morning of homeschool activities and a visit to the park, we came home to the colorful results! As the paper towel absorbs the water from each of the filled glasses, it travels across the strip until they are too full of liquid to absorb anymore and they drip into the intermittent glasses. We ended up with all three secondary colors, orange, green and purple!







Happy Mad Science Monday and, as always, Happy Playing!