Experimenting with Color Mixing

Since I have begun homeschooling my oldest, whom I call Boober, we have looked for ways to include his sister, Red. We like to include her in science and we do a circle time together every day. We also do things like art and sensory play with her.

One of the activities we have done recently was actually planned for her but her big brother liked it so much I thought we would share it with you! This activity is so easy and inexpensive. All you need are bath color tabs, which are sold by Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon. You will also need 6 clear containers, we used drinking glasses and water.

To start I filled each of the tallest drinking glasses with water, then I asked Boober and Red to carefully drop a red, blue and yellow tab into the water. I explained that these are primary colors, or the colors used to make all sorts of other colors.

We then mixed a small amount of water from two glasses into an empty glass. I allowed each child to dump a little water into the glass and then see what happened. For this experiment, we guessed which color would be made from each mix.

They had so much fun each time we would mix the color. For example, as we mixed yellow and red I asked what they thought the combo would result in. They expected purple. They were amazed to find that it turned orange. Then they added a few drops of red to make a darker orange. They also had fun moving the glasses in front of each other to see how it appeared to change the color of the water without mixing.

This was a great experiment and really helped them understand primary and secondary colors. Plus it wasn’t as messy as some of our other experiments have been!