Saturday, March 10, 2012

A Simple Experiment With Light and Color for Children

While our colored finger lights still have battery power left (an amazing feat considering how often I've found them left on over the course of the week) I thought it might be fun to use them for a fast and simple Science Sunday experiment.

First, I had C (age 5) color a rainbow on white paper.


Then, we moved into a dark room, and took a look at her picture under each of our lights...


...red, blue, and green. It was interesting to see how the colors of the rainbow appeared to change, or even disappear, depending on which color of light we were shining on the picture.


We tried the experiment out on a handful of jelly beans too...



...before I turned them over to the children to snack on, while watching The Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow (click the link to find it on YouTube). The episode discusses light and color, and does a pretty good job explaining what we observed in our experiment.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with:

Science Sunday

7 comments:

Eddie said...

I like the jellybean part of it! Besides the tastiness, the glowing was pretty cool also!

Christy Killoran said...

This is very cool! I'll have to do this soon.

Ticia said...

The rainbow looked so cool under the green picture. I'm trying to think if my kids finger lights are different colors or not.

Phyllis said...

What a fun, simple demo! MSB is always a great follow-up to science demonstrations.

Kelly at Little Wonders' Days said...

Great demonstration!

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

Nice! I really want to do it too now!

Debbie said...

I remember doing this in school. I love the jelly bean part.