Mixing colours

Why leave teaching kids about mixing colours to paint and paper when you can make magic ice cubes, rainbow cake, and milk colour explosions instead. :)

  Magic Ice Cubes

A lovely simple little activity which gives you the opportunity to teach children about primary colours, mixing colours, and different temperatures.

First of all we filled our ice cube trays with water and added a couple of drops of red, yellow, and blue food dye. My children love playing with water so this went down really well. We put them in the freezer and left them for around four hours.

Once the ice cubes were ready we talked about how the cold had made the water into solid ice and then popped two different coloured cubes into a glass of water and watched the water change colour. My two year old was really excited seeing the water change and my four year old was hyper guessing what colour the water would turn with different combination of ice cubes.

Rainbow Cake

First of all whip up a batch of basic cake mixture and divide between six bowls.

250g butter
250g caster sugar
250g self raising flour
4 eggs
tbsp milk
drop of vanilla (or flavoring of your choice)




Beat together the butter and caster sugar. Add the eggs, milk, and vanilla. Sieve the flour into the mixture and stir.

Add a few drops of red, yellow, and blue food dye to the first three bowls. This is also a good chance to talk about primary colours.

Then use the remaining three bowls to mix the colours together to make a green, orange and purple mixture. 

Using a different spoon for each different colour put a blob of mixture into a cupcake case, layering the colours on top of each other. 

Pop them in a preheated oven at 180 degrees and cook for about 10-15 minutes. 

Omnomnom

Milky Colour Explosions 

This is a pretty cool experiment. I got carried away doing this with my kids and forgot to take photos oops!
The only picture I have is this one which was taken after playing around with the blue and yellow food dye.

I quite like it. It reminds me of the earth :/ 

(I will repeat this experiment and update with pictures later)

First of all you need to add warm full fat milk to a dinner plate or shallow bowl. Then add a drop of red blue and yellow food dye into the center.

You will probably notice that the drops of food dye sit on the surface of the milk. This is because food dye is less dense then milk so unless it is stirred it will float on the surface. Not a lot happens until you add the magic ingredient. Washing up liquid!

Dip a cotton wool swab into some washing up liquid and dip into the milk and watch how the colours magically move swirl and  explode. Mixing into new colours and creating pretty patterns.

The washing up liquid reduces the surface tension of the milk by separating the fat molecules which creates currents in the milk. The food coloring moves with the currents, swirling around to make a funky colour wheel

As the soap becomes evenly mixed with the milk, the action slows down and eventually stops. Adding  another drop of washing up liquid will start the process again.