Educating Risa

My friend Sarah sent me this simple science video:

The boys and I gave it a whirl today, with a few variations.

If you try this at home, we found it worked better if you put the food colouring closer together, overlapping or even on top of one another. I didn’t do this.

Now, add a drop of dish soap and see what happens. (We added a few extra drops around the edges). Here’s what we got:

 

It had a kind of hypnotic, lava-lamp like quality. The boys were keen to try their own bowls now that they’d seen how it was done:

I’ll just draw your attention to the background of the next photo, in case you were under delusions of “perfect homeschooling families”. Yup, that’d be our living room, with nowhere to sit between games, dinos and books all over the couches. Can’t clean now, Mom…too busy playing and learning!

We then tried the experiment with other milks. I explained to the boys how it worked, with the colouring suspended in the fat molecules of the milk. We made a hypothesis that the almond milk, being creamier, would work better than the rice milk, which is quite thin. This proved to be correct: the colouring in the rice milk just melded together, like in water, where the almond swirled somewhat, though not as much as the full fat cow’s milk. Here’s the almond milk:

Here’s the rice milk:

We went back to the cow’s milk for our final variation: using 2 colours only. The boys thought the yellow and blue combo was quite interesting, as a dinosaur appeared and then disappeared! Note the skin texture and crest on its head. Clearly a parasaurolophus!

Have fun with this at home.