Practice colour theory. What are your child’s favourite colours? How can you mix new colours? What colour is cooking oil and what colour is water?
Phase 1: Material
- Disposable plates
- Household paint
- Glass jars
- Pipettes
- Cooking oil
Phase 2: Activity
Pour cooking oil into a disposable plate. Mix food colouring powder with water in glass jars to get different colours or use ready-made food colouring products. Start pipetting one food colouring at a time onto the cooking oil. Try to make small droplets. What’s going on? Does the oil and paint mix? The drops? Let’s try different colours and different sizes of drops. What happens if you put two colours on top of each other?
You get drop art. We recommend taking pictures of the teardrop art with iPads.
Finally, try mixing all the paint drops together with the pipette tip as a mixing aid? What happens then? Do you get the drops to mix with the oil or with each other?
Phase 3: Why?
Oil and water do not mix with each other since they have different chemical bonds.
This science experiment is also suitable for the youngest in early childhood education.
This idea come from STEAM Turku
