Science is art

I’ve seen this experiment on Pinterest a million times, I actually remember doing this same experiment in my 8th grade science class. I could tell you a lot of things about that class, but I couldn’t tell you why we did this experiment.

The idea is simple, you pour milk in a shallow bowl and drop food coloring into the milk, then use a toothpick dipped in dish soap to swirl the colors.  The concept that the experiment teaches is surface tension, and the idea that the soap glides through the milk, swirling the colors without actually mixing them. This was all over my kiddos’ heads, but they loved it all the same.

We mix colors a lot, it’s pretty much their favorite thing to do, so the fact that these colors didn’t mix at first was really cool to them.  They did eventually get some murky colored milk, but they also made some really neat art while exploring scientific concepts!