Oil and Water Activities: Kitchen Fireworks and Rainbow Raindrops

We put some color into our lazy gloomy gray Sunday with these two activities. L kept saying "ooo pretty!"

Kitchen Fireworks

What you need:

Vegetable Oil

Water

food coloring

How To:

1. Pour water into a clear glass or pitcher leaving roughly an inch of space at the top of the glass. Water must be room temperature so either: let it sit out a bit -or- make it room temperature from the faucet.

2. Add some vegetable oil to the water till you've got about an inch or two of oil on top of the water

3. Add just a few drops of food coloring into the class and watch the fireworks!

This is such a simple project and kids will enjoy watching it because the color beads drop slowly because of the oil. When they hit the water they are released and sort of explode into the water.

Very cool.

NOTE: Add the darker colors right after your lighter colors (red and yellow) start dropping. The green and blue (especially blue) drop really fast and will cloud up your water before your other colors even start to drop. I would recommend adding blue LAST-after all other colors start dropping from the oil.

Rainbow Raindrops

Another Activity I did was just dump a ton of vegetable oil into a clear mason jar and then I added drops of food coloring (which of course held their drop shape in the oil) which then float to the bottom. I took a spoon and just very gently stirred them up. Lawson thought this was pretty cool also.
Again, it was lots of "oooo pretty!"

 

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