Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Experiment

Last week I took the kids to the park one morning. We go to the park 3, sometimes 4, mornings a week when it's nice. Most of the time we go to one of the playgrounds, but this time we went for a walk. We walked past the duck pond and gazebo, then over the little foot bridge, and down to this (what I assume is) rock art installation. The kids like to look under the foot bridge and climb up the rocks and jump off. They are really into jumping off of things lately. Then we walked further down the hill and used the swings on one of the little playgrounds.

After much convincing and some screaming on Gillian's part, we headed back to the car. On the way back over the foot bridge, we found some Queen Anne's Lace and I remembered a friend's recent face.book post about dyeing flowers with her daughters. So, we picked some, and Gillian was quite pleased to carry it to the car for us (thankfully, it distracted her from screaming). When we got home, we filled three juice glasses with water. Colin picked red dye, Gillian picked blue, and I picked green. After about 24 hours, we had these:
DSC_0290.NEF

The colors got much darker and intense over the next two days, but I didn't take any more pictures! The kids enjoyed seeing them turn colors and we talked about how and why that happened. So, all in all, our first science experiment went very well!

2 comments:

Patty said...

I used to love doing this experiment when I was a teacher. I must say that the results using Queen Anne's Lace look much better than using celery :-) I hope Colin and Gillian enjoyed their first science experiment!

Lisa said...

What a fun idea! I think I'm going to have to borrow this one from you to try out with Dylan!