Hi everyone! I’m taking advantage of this 3-day weekend to get caught up on my to-do list! My husband and I spent all day cleaning yesterday, and I threw out my back out vacuuming! #officiallyold
Today I’m taking it easy, and cleaning up the office/desktop, and wanted to share with you the project my students and I did for our science fair this year.
Every year our school has a science fair. The students work individually or in pairs to complete an experiment. We display them all in our cafeteria for classroom walk-thru’s, and parents viewing. Pre-K and Kinder do group projects because if we sent something home, it would just become a parent project (although I kind of feel like that’s what it becomes regardless of the grade anyway : )
I’ve admired these color changing experiments with flowers or celery for a while, and decided that this year we would tackle the project. I started by grabbing some white carnations and food coloring at Vons.
I also purchased these large test tubes from Learning Resources. Check them out HERE. I was pleasantly surprised with how wide the opening were, and how sturdy the containers seemed to be. They are perfect for kindergarten!
We added about 10 drops of food coloring to each vial. I only had the red, yellow, green, and blue food coloring, so we had to mix some of the colors together to get the orange and purple. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to discuss color mixing again, and we brought out our favorite color book:
Miraculously, no one spilled any of the food coloring on the carpet, cabinet, rug, or their clothing, so already the experiment was a success! I cut the flower stems back a bit, and the students placed the flowers into the vials.
We recorded our hypothesis’ which ranged from – the flowers will change colors, nothing will happen, and to the inevitable – the flowers will explode (why is this always a hypothesis when we do science experiments?!?! #iblamecartoons)
I put the science fair board together and recorded our materials, procedure, and hypothesis’.
I believe I took this picture after 48 hours of the flowers soaking in the water. They started to change around 24 hours after we put them in the water, and the flowers actually lasted over a week! During our experiment, the yellow and orange changed color the most, and the purple absorbed the color the least. I would be curious to see if anyone else got different results.
My kids loved this experiment, and they kept bringing their parents in to show them the flowers and talk about what was happening, so that made it even more worth while for me! If you would like a copy of the forms I used for my science fair board, just click on the picture below! I hope you enjoy doing this with your students, and let me know how it comes out!
