Rainbows and Color Mixing

During St. Patrick's day we did activities about leprechauns and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We followed this up by learning facts about rainbows.

We read this book, which is full of great facts about rainbows (Thanks for lending it out Julie!).

 

The students then wrote facts about rainbows. I will include the sheet we used in a follow-up post.

During our lessons on rainbows we began to discuss colors and the color wheel. After we finished our lesson we still had questions about colors. We had learned that different colors blend to form other colors, and we wanted to know which colors could be blended to make purple.  We decided to become scientists to help answer our question.

To start off I put three fizzing color tabs (these were purchased from Steve Spangler Science) into plastic cups. We had red, blue, and yellow. I had the students make hypotheses about which two colors they thought would make purple.

Then we worked in small groups. Together we mixed red and yellow, yellow and blue, and red and blue. We were so excited when we discovered that red and blue made purple.

After we worked together to find the answer to our question, each student got their own pipette and mixing tray (both purchased from Steve Spangler Science) for further experimentation.

Madi, one of our super fifth grade helpers, worked with some of the students on this experiment.

Once the students finished the experiment they filled out a lab report. I am including a copy of this in a follow-up post. 

My little scientists loved this experiment!