Walking Water Experiment: Summer of Science Series

The Summer of Science Series is all about the fun science experiments I’ve been doing with the kids this summer.

During the school year, I noticed that my 9-year-old was having trouble with color mixing. I can remember vividly the sing-songy way my teacher taught me about colors back in grade school: Yellow and blue make green! Red and blue make purple! I was surprised she hadn’t learned color mixing by 3rd grade (or maybe she just wasn’t paying attention). To solve this, I found a really cool learning experiment that she thoroughly enjoyed. But most importantly, she walked away with a firm knowledge of what new colors can be formed by mixing the primary colors.

For this experiment you need:

• Several clear cups (at least 3, but we used 9)
• Food coloring
• Paper Towels
• Water

Place cups side by side. Fill every other cup with water. Mix the water with several drops of food coloring (leave the in between cups empty). You can use whatever colors you want, be we did red on the ends and in between did blue, yellow and green.

Fold a paper towel in half lengthways and again so that it fits into the neck of your cup.  Now place one end of the paper towel into the red water (or whatever color you use) and bend the paper towel over the edge of the cup so that the other end sits in the empty cup next to it. Continue this process with the rest of the cups.

This is called The Walking Water Experiment because water gets absorbed and starts walking up the paper towels and filling up the next cup.

Within a few hours, you will have completely new color combinations that have filled up the empty cups. My daughter was thrilled and in awe of how pretty it was (her description)!

This process took us about 3 hours, though I’ve read it can be done in about 2 hours.

What we learned to speed up the process:

• Fill the cups as full as possible so that the water doesn’t have as far to climb up the paper towels. (We did not do this initially. We added more water later).
• Place the water filled cups on books so that they are higher than the empty cups. Gravity will make the empty cups fill up faster.

This could be a really fun science project, or just something cool to do with the kids that will teach them a lesson about colors!

Here is the video tutorial: