We recently opened a gift (Learning Resources Primary Science Set) received for the twins' birthday. They worked on making a colorful volcano experiment with baking soda, vinegar and food colors. After many excited tries of the fizzling experiment it went into open play mode. The twins changed it into color mixing activity trying to create new colors. They love mixing and making new paint colors.
Also,Watercolor painting has become a go-to activity nowadays. Here is our latest art wall at our home. The old pencil sketches are being quickly replaced by more vibrant watercolor paintings. I love the splash of color on an otherwise bland room.
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| Art wall |
I wanted to take their interest in color mixing and painting further. So I set up a little provocation. This video is my inspiration for this provocation.
Objective : Make your own paint with given house hold ingredients.
Guidelines : Try different combinations of materials rather than dumping everything together.
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| Ingredients all set to explore |
This was an open inquiry. No recipe was given to them. They were free to use any ingredient given to make their desired paint. I had placed a few different measuring spoons anticipating them to measure for their recipes. But they were too excited to do any measurements.
The ingredients given were
1. All purpose flour
2. Salt
3. Cornstarch
4. Vinegar
5. Water
6. Colored chalk powders - I preferred to use colored chalk powder instead of liquid food colors for color pigments. I suspected that the kids might mistake liquid food colors for liquid water colors and question the objective of this provocation.
They both assigned themselves a color (obviously pink for Nidhi and blue for Sid) and set to work.
Each tried 6 different recipes. I kept a note of each of their recipe to remind them not to duplicate any recipe. Here are the combinations they tried.
Nidhi
1. salt+color+water
2. Flour+cornstarch+water+color
3. Flour+cornstarch+vinegar+color
4. Flour+ water+color
5. Flour+salt+ water+color
6. salt+vinegar+color
Sid :
1. Salt+water+vinegar+color
2. Flour+water+color
3.cornstarch+water+color
4. Flour+vinegar+color
5. salt+vinegar+color
6. constarch+ vinegar+color
Here are the resultant paints made. Lovely shades of pink and blues.
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| Fresh vibrant home made watercolor paint |
Next step was to test out their paints.
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| Testing out the self made paints |
Depending on spreadability, we discussed about terms such as thick, thin, watery etc.
Nidhi observed that she loved the little residues of unmixed salt on her paper.
To inspire them, I painted this with the paints they made.
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| Painting to inspire |
"Mom, I want to make green to paint the stems of my flower. I want to make yellow paint so that I can mix blue and yellow" , claimed Nidhi.
I supplied them some turmeric powder. Here is a short video of Nidhi making up her green paint recipe.
Sid explored if he can mix two colors directly on paper. He tried painting green by overlaying blue on yellow on his painting. And it worked!
They both completed their paintings and the result is beautiful.
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| Sid's painting |
"Hey Nidhi! Next time we don't have paint, we can make our own!", exclaimed Sid. Now that's a sense of accomplishment they deserve.
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