Experimenting with Color

In Color Group today we experimented with color. I set out the materials for our experiments and invited QM, TB, and LC to join me at the table. I sat quietly for a moment as they explored the materials and talked among themselves. They were keen to discuss which colors they liked best and theorize on what the empty jars might be for.

TB pointed to blue and then green, "These are my favorite colors, Q."
QM pointed to purple, "This mine!"
As LC joined us she announced, "My favorite is pink! I'm having Pink!"
"What are the jars for?" TB asked me. I looked at him quietly and he suggested, "For the colors??"
LC nodded, "Yeah! For colors! For making colors! I'm putting pink in one!"
TB looked back and forth between QM and LC, "We could share all the colors."
QM nodded in agreement, "Yeah!!!"
LC shook her head, "No! Then I won't have any!"
TB said, "I'm going to use green then."
"I want pink!" LC announced.
"This one mine!" QM said.

I chose this moment to speak up, "It sounds like you've each picked out a color you want to use. That definitely works. We are going to do some color experiments and we need one color to be a base color so we can compare the colors we make to it at the end. Since blue hasn't been picked, that can be our base color."

I carefully put a few drops of blue into the first empty jar then added water to make it a rich hue that we could see light through. It was important to be able to see through the color so that we can more easily compare it to the colors we created. Everyone watched very intently, silently taking in what I was doing. I slowly took my very full jar and added our base color to each of the jars in equal amounts speaking as I did this, "I'm going to add the same amount of blue to each jar. We want to be able to tell what happens when we add our color so we try to keep everything the same as possible in each jar. The same amount of water, the same amount of food coloring." Once I was finished everyone was eager to add their colors!

"Before we add your colors we need to talk about what we think will happen! Let's look at LC's jar first. It has blue in it now and LC will add pink to it. This jar will be Jar B. What do you think will happen to Jar B?" I recorded our thoughts in our experiment journal. TB said "It's going to turn it red!"


"Okay, and what about your jar, TB? It's blue now and you are adding green. Let's call yours Jar C. What will Jar C do?" LC spoke up this time, "Red or green or pink!!!" I recorded her ideas.

"And last is Jar D which is QM's jar. It's blue now and we are going to add purple. What might happen?" All three of them had a different idea this time! QM said it would be yellow. LC said it would turn red. TB said it would be pink! Now that we had recorded all of our assumptions, we could begin our experiment.

We started with Jar B. LC carefully added a few drops of pink. The pink added to the blue made the color dark again so we added tiny amounts of water until we could see through it. Then we placed it next to our base jar (Jar A). All three of them studied it for a second discussing what color they thought it might be. We repeated with Jar C and and Jar D before recording what happened.

Before closing up our group we made a base for the pink color. Using this, I showed everyone how different the color in our base pink jar looked from Jar B. TB noted, "You can see blue in all of our jars!" We talked about how even though the jars were now light purple or pink, green, and dark purple we could still see a blue hue in each of them. This was because we started with blue in each jar! TB wanted to test out whether or not blue would remain if we added more pink to our Jar B. We added ten more drops, but we could still see the blue hue. We added ANOTHER ten drops but we could still see the blue hue. We added one last round of ten drops.... but we could still see the blue hue! No matter how much pink we saturated our jar with, the blue hue remained. I can't wait until our next color experiment!