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Sample
Activities
Color and Optics Curriculum |
Water Colors
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Learning Objective
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The primary colors are red, blue and yellow. Food coloring added to water
will change the color of the water. Food coloring is used to change the
color of many foods and beverages.
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| Materials Needed
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- food coloring: red, blue, and yellow
- measuring cup
- funnel
- 4 flashlights
- 3 ice trays
- 4 half liter soda bottles with caps, labels removed
- water
- sponges
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| Experiment |
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- Place a funnel in your bottle.
- Using a measuring cup, fill the bottle with water.
- Add several drops of food coloring, and screw the cap on tight.
- Place the bottle on its side and roll back and forth on a table.
- Hold the bottle up to the light. Look through it.
- Place your hand behind the bottle and look at it.
- Look at a friend's face through the bottle.
- Shine a flashlight through the bottle.
- Make one bottle of each primary color.
- Pour the colored water into three ice trays.
- Freeze.
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| Discovery Questions |
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- What does rolling the bottle do to the food coloring?
- Did your hand look different when you looked at it through the bottle?
- What happened to your friend's face?
- Did they look bigger or smaller?
- Could you see the light from the flashlight through the bottle?
- What color did you see?
- What will the colored water look like after it has been in the freezer?
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| Book |
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Hoban, Tana. Is it Red? Is it Yellow? Is it
Blue?, © 1978, Greenwillow Books.
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| Connections |
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- What does food coloring remind you of?
- Do you think you could make a picture with food coloring?
- Can you think of some foods that you enjoy that might be colored with
food coloring?
- Why do you think food coloring is added to food?
- Do you think cake icing has food coloring in it?
- What about Jell-O?
- Would you want to drink orange juice if it was green?
- What about blue milk?
- What color are your drinking glasses at home?
- Try looking through them to see if they change the way things look.
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Color Cubes
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| Learning Objective |
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The primary colors are red, blue and yellow. They
combine to make green, orange and purple. All three primary colors combine
to make brown. Ice cubes melt if they are left in a cup because the
temperature in a room is warmer than inside a freezer. When two or more ice
cubes of different colors are put in a cup and allowed to melt, a new color
is created. Drawing pictures can help you remember the steps you took to
answer a question.
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| Materials |
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- ice cube trays with frozen colored water red, blue, yellow
- clear plastic cups
- 3x5 cards
- markers or crayons: red, blue, yellow
- paper towels cut into quarters
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| Experiment |
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- Remove the three ice trays from the freezer, prepared in the last
experiment.
- Decide what ice cubes you would like to melt together.
- On a 3x5 card draw blobs of color to represent the ice cubes you picked
to melt together.
- Put the ice cubes in a plastic cup.
- Observe the ice cubes as they melt.
- Hold the cup up and look at the water collected at the bottom of the
cup.
- Take a piece of paper towel and put it on the table.
- Using your fingers to keep the ice cubes in the cup, pour a tiny bit of
the water from your cup onto the paper towel.
- Look at the new color. Do you know the name of the color?
- Set the cup aside so the ice can melt completely. Place the card you
made beside it.
- Use the remaining colored ice cubes to set up different experiments.
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| Discovery Questions |
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- How many different colors can be made by combining red, blue and yellow?
- Did you try red and blue?
- Red and yellow?
- Yellow and blue?
- What happens if you try all three primary colors together?
- Why is the ice melting?
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| Connections |
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- What could we do to make the ice melt faster?
- Why doesn't a plain ice cube have a color?
- Why are popsicles different colors?
- What is in them that gives them color?
- Look around the room. Can you find three different red toys, three
different blue toys, three different yellow toys?
- Can you find an orange toy, a purple toy, and a green toy?
- Can you set up the toys to look like your experiment cards?
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| Read |
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Rockwell, Anne. Mr. Panda's Painting, © 1993,
Macmillan Publishing Company. |
| Mr. Panda, an artist, buys tubes of paint in every color and
then goes home to paint with them. |
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Colorful Clay
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| Learning Objective |
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The primary colors are red, blue and yellow. They
combine to make green, orange and purple. Clay of different colors can be
combined to create new colors. Drawing pictures can help you remember the
steps you took to answer a question. Equal means the same. |
| Materials |
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- play dough: red, blue, and yellow
- 3x5 cards
- plastic wrap
- needed
- plastic knives
- crayons: red, blue and yellow
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| Experiment |
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- Roll the red, yellow and blue play dough into long snakes.
- Cover with plastic wrap to keep from drying out.
- Choose one of the colored play doughs.
- Pick a crayon the same color.
- On a card, draw a mark representing the color you picked .
- Repeat with a second color.
- Cut off equal size chunks of clay from the colors you chose.
- Mash them together until they are totally mixed.
- Put your mixed clay on your card.
- Repeat with another combination of colors.
- Let your clay samples dry.
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| Discovery Questions |
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- Compare the colors you created with the ones your friends made.
- Are they alike?
- What color can be made by combining red and blue, red and yellow, blue
and yellow?
- What color do you get when you combine all three colors?
- What happens if you don't use equal size pieces?
- Are there different color reds?
- Are all blues alike?
- Is yellow always the same?
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| Connections |
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- We mixed colored water and now we have mixed play dough colors.
Did anything surprise you? Did your cards for the clay look like the cards
for the melting ice cubes?
- We added the same color food coloring to the play dough as we did to the
water. Is the red play dough the same color as the red water? What is
different about them?
- Look around the room and see if you can find colors that have the same
name but look different. Is a lemon the same color as a banana? Is a red
apple the same color as a tomato? Compare some colors at home today.
- Can you think of something red at your house? Something yellow?
Something blue? What about on the way to school? What colors did you see
today?
- What else could we mix together? Can we mix paints?
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| Read |
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Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh.
Talk about the colors that the mice created by climbing into the paint jars.
Compare their results with the experiment of mixing clay. |
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