Sunday, January 29, 2012

Absorb a web of color

This activity worked so well when I taught preschool!! Sadly it didn't go as well when I tried it with Biscuit this weekend. However it still resulted in a beautiful piece of art to display, so all is well that ends well, am I right?!

The idea behind the activity is to show your little one how salt "absorbs" the colors and pulls it along the web of glue.

 You will need card stock, an eyedropper, salt, glue and colored water.
We used about two tablespoons of water and five or six drops of neon food coloring.
Depending on your work space you may want to place your card stock on a rimmed baking sheet to contain the mess.

 
Have your little one make a design on the card stock with glue, then sprinkle salt all over the wet glue until it is completely covered.

You will want to shake off the excess salt!


Next let your child use the eyedropper to drip colored water, one drop at a time, onto the salt.
As the salt absorbs the liquid, the water should move along the glue lines making a beautiful web of color.


As you can see the color moved quickly across some lines and just bubbled up on others.
 I think the absorption didn't go too well for us due to the fact that we used washable glue and Biscuit was really excited to drop the colors on the paper, so perhaps we dropped too much water at once?



All in all it turned out pretty interesting!!


Happy Playing & Exploring!!



5 comments:

  1. Still looks like a lot of fun! I'm going to give it a try (even though we only have washable glue, and there is no doubt in my mind the boys will want to drop a lot of water.)

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  2. I posted about how we did this today! Thanks for the great idea! (I linked to you.)

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  3. This looks super cool!! What a neat effect! Thanks for linking up to TGIF =-) See you next week,
    Beth

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  4. This looks like so much fun! My kids would really love this...

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  5. We just tried this today. The boys used their washable glue (before I remembered you mentioned it in your post) and the results weren't great, so we tested it with tacky glue and it turned out much better! Thanks for the fun idea! :)

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