a fun and easy experiment for kids
I'm sure we've just about all seen this Skittles activity... but I'm still going to share it anyway! It was extremely easy to do and my kid loved seeing the colors bleed. We did it as a Saint Patrick's Day activity because of the rainbow correlation... but you could easily turn this into a science lesson about different water temperature, diffusion, chemical change, osmosis, density, measuring the amount of water... how ever you would like to spin it based on your child's age and what you are looking to teach. Since this was our first time doing it and he is so young, I just wanted him to
experience it and enjoy watching the colors "melt" and create a rainbow. Maybe in a future experiment we will do more of the learning aspect of it.
Grab a small white plate (or bowl) that has a little bit of a lip on it. Line up your skittles however you would like. We did a simple ring around the edge but you could try a line, an 'X' or experiment with groupings of two/three/or four with spaces in between each grouping. We used the traditional skittles, but I think experimenting with the different flavors of skittles would be cool
too because they have different colors. Such as the tropical ones that
would have more blue, pink and purple colors.
Now grab some warm/hot water and pour it onto the plate. If you are able to fully submerge the Skittles you will be able to get the best color bleed. Ours was just slightly below the tops of the Skittles but we were still able to get a really cool effect! Very satisfying to watch.
We used pretty hot water and we were able to see the colors bleed almost immediately. It's funny because I was trying to surprise my son with this activity when I asked him to grab a bag of Skittles at check out. He asked me why and I told him we were going to do a little experiment with them when we got home to which he very excitedly told me that he knew what we were going to do because Blippi does it! Who knew?! We both still enjoyed doing this quick and easy activity.
That's it! Have fun and make it your own. Play around with different patterns, orders, colors, etc.
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