Try the Water Walk Experiment With Your Children
Few kids can resist a good science experiment, and I’ve always found the best ones to be those that are easy to set up, use materials you already have in your home, and that are as fun or interesting for you as they are for them. That’s why I couldn’t help but try this Walking Water experiment from PBS Kids – and it didn’t disappoint.
To get started, you need the simplest of the materials:
- Three transparent jars or glasses
- Paper towels
- Water
- Food coloring
- A couple of stacks of books
When it comes to paper towels, cheaper and less absorbent towels are actually better suited because their low absorbency helps the water to “walk” faster. Once you’ve collected all your materials, follow these directions from PBS Kids :
1. Have your child fill two jars with water. Add food coloring to two cans.
2. Place an empty jar between two jars filled with colored water. For best results, place each outer jar on top of a book of the same thickness. Ask your child if he knows what gravity is? If he gets stuck, explain that gravity is the force that pulls objects together. In this experiment, gravity will help the water move faster into the empty jar.
3. Help your child fold the paper towel in half several times to form a long, thin strip about an inch wide. Repeat with another paper towel.
4. Ask him to dip one end of a strip of paper towel in a jar of colored water and place the other end of the strip in an empty jar. Repeat with the second strip of paper towel. The dry pieces of the two paper towels should now meet in the middle jar.
Your setup will look like this (and if you have multiple Diary of a Wimpy Kid books , two on each side should be fine):
The water will enter the central container in a few minutes; while you wait, make a few predictions with your child: will the water really walk and how long will it take? What happens when you put two different colors together?
My son and I cooked ours right before lunch to see the results unfold as we ate. He chose yellow food coloring for one can and neon blue for the other. The result was a beautiful yellow, green and blue rainbow effect as the colors slowly blended together.
You can consider other color combinations: yellow and red, or red and blue. And when you’re done, PBS Kids will bring you more experiments, crafts, and activities for the whole family .
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