E-learning day!

Today Hurricane Helene walloped the gulf side of Florida and battered much of the Southeast with wind and rain this morning. School was called off and today was deemed an e-learning day for that reason. I was lucky to be able to stay home with my kids and nudge them along with their assignments. My youngest was given a short list of experiments to do as her science homework. We arranged 6 clear plastic cups in a circle and added water to them in varying levels. We then added red, yellow and blue food coloring to 3 of the cups.

Notice how the cups with the colored water have more volume than the cups we left clear? The amount of liquid in each cup is different.

After adding the colors, we folded paper towels into long, narrow pieces that could act as bridges between the cups.

Thanks to capillary action, the water from each cup can "climb" up the paper towels in that cup and go over to the next cup.

After about an hour, this is what we saw.

The cups that contained clear water at the beginning now contain the color that results from mixing the two primary colors that were adjacent to it.

And what I find to be the coolest part: the liquid level in all of the cups in now the same.

The kids thought this was a fun experiment, though they reliably love anything with colors or bubbles. Not exactly a tough crowd!