Welcome back for another STEM Saturday! The other day we were at the store and we noticed some gorgeous flowers that were brightly died. My son (age 7) was immediately curious to find out how the flowers got the color (since he could tell it wasn’t natural.) That’s when we decided to do this classic simple science experiment for kids. We tried to make color changing flowers and you can too!
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Color Changing Flowers
Setting up the Experiment
Materials:
Vases/Containers
Water
Food Coloring
White Flowers (We used Daisies)
Optional:
Stop Watch
Pencil
Paper
Set Up:
Set up is fairly simple. After we cut down each bunch of flowers to the size of our jars, we added water and food coloring to each jar. Now we were ready to observe.
Making Observations and Noticing
Per our usual routine, I made a simple chart for the children to make their predictions and observations on. Since we do all of our science child-led, I wasn’t sure what they would be observing ahead of time. They decided they wanted to draw what the flowers looked like at the beginning and then they wanted to test the length of time it took to notice a change.
They both stated that they thought the flowers absorb the water through the stem but they had differing ideas on how long it would take to see the effects.
Even Super B (age 2) decided that she needed to get in on the action. She was fascinated by the flowers and loved drawing the stems and petals.
Conducting the Experiment
This part takes a little bit of patience. Its a great experiment to set up and have other centers or activities ready to work on while you wait. Then you can set a timer to come back and check every 30 minutes.
The experiment is simple. Watch for changes in the petals. We started to see a change at 30 minutes in our red dye, but it took up to 2 hours to see a change in the yellow.
It was really cool to see the petals close up and see how the water had traveled through the petals. The boys (and I) were a little confused about the intensity of the color. We thought the dye would be more intense. This just led us to create a new experiment that we will try tomorrow. Tomorrow we plan to add varying amounts of dye to the jars and see if we can determine the right ration of water to dye. I am just as curious as the boys are.
Do you have a favorite Simple Science Experiments for Kids? I would love to know! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram or subscribe by email. I can’t wait to hear your ideas.
TIME FOR STEM SATURDAY BLOG HOP!
Every Saturday we will get so many wonderful ideas linked up from around the web that we have decided we want to feature some of these great ideas. That’s why every Saturday, I will pick from the posts linked up and feature my absolute favorites. This might be a hard choice to make, luckily you can always head over to last week’s post and check out more great science resources!
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I love this experiment! My son did something similar at preschool – they were using celery. He was so excited he came home and wanted to see if he could change the color of the tomatoes we had. Flowers seem much easier to see the change in, and they’re prettier! Thanks for sharing!
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