Inventing New Colors w/ Food Coloring + Water

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A huge thanks to Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time) for providing us with their Experience Preschool curriculum for free in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. It’s been such a huge blessing to us! As always, my opinions on awesome stuff for little kids are 100% my own.

Every once in a while, we stumble across something awesome that quickly becomes a favorite and last month’s Inventing New Colors activity from Mother Goose Time was just that. I seriously can’t even count how many times the little guy and I have done this activity.

We’ve tried it at home and at school. At school, I give each of the toddlers a few beakers w/ food coloring + water and 5-10 minutes to experiment. We take turns and do it one or two at a time.

I’m not even kidding when I say that if it were up to them, the little guy and his friends would keep doing this over and over again. They love it that much.

And it’s so simple. You could totally get away with using just a few clear plastic cups, food coloring, and a large Tupperware container.

You know what they say about using teachable moments as they occur and I can’t think of a better opportunity to learn about the color wheel and color mixing. We made a quick color wheel with a paper plate and hung it above our sensory bin at school.

I wanted to be able to point out the difference between primary and secondary colors as well as what the result would be when mixing different colors together.

Each time you do this, the results will vary. The possibilities for inventing new colors are endless.

Are you and your little kids ready to try out this fun experiment too?

What you’ll need

• Food Coloring
• Plastic Beakers
• Activity Tub

Here’s how to do it

I fill three of the plastic beakers with water and put them in the activity tub. I’m always careful not to fill them up too much. Filling each of them half way usually works.

After that, I add a few drops of food coloring to each of the beakers.

What the little guy and his friends do from there is totally up to them. The only rule is to keep it in the bin. That’s actually my rule both at home and at school for any sensory-type activity, so it’s definitely not new to them by any means.

These are the moments that make me absolutely love Mother Goose Time and of course homeschooling preschool. We can totally do our own thing. Not only did we do this activity last month as part of our Science Lab theme, but we’ve also done it just about every week since.

The longer we use this awesome curriculum, the more I see it becoming a natural part of our days. I have to think about it a lot less than I did back then.

These days, I take a quick look at the Teacher Guide in the morning and then we get to it. It’s grab and go for us at this point.

Mother Goose Time is definitely a blessing and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to continue with it through Kindergarten. Of course, we would eventually want to add Experience God and More Math & More Literacy too, but I seriously couldn’t ask for more.

A monthly theme broken down into 20 or so topics each packaged into a separate daily discovery bag with just about everything we need for that particular day. Um hello! That’s all kinds of awesome.

Looking for more insight & inspiration? Here are the top 10 most popular posts from The Keeper of the Memories. You’re definitely not going to want to miss these!

Thanks so much for visiting. See ya next week!