Walking Water Wonders: A Splash into Colorful Science!

Welcome back to Domestic Mom Bliss. Where we review different recipes, arts and crafts, and science experiments.

Today’s experiment is a pretty cool one. It’s called the Walking Water Experiment. You fill cups with water and put paper towels in each cup, and watch the water walk on the paper towel to the other cup.

All you need is 3 glasses or cups, water, food coloring, and paper towels. First, you will fill up two glasses with water to a little bit below the rim of glass. These glasses will be placed on the outside with one cup in the middle. The cup in the middle will not have any water in it.

Second, you will put about 5 or so drops of dye into the outer glasses. Third, you are going to take a paper towel, tear it in two and place half in the outer cups and half in the middle cup. I folded the paper towel after I tore it. I am not sure if this made the walking water take longer or not.

It’s cool to experiment and see what works best. Last, you watch the water walk over the paper towel into the middle cup. If you use food coloring, it’s easier to see and it will also mix the colors to create a new color in the middle cup.

Take a look at ours. We did multiple tries because these glass cups were really tall, and it was taking longer for the water to get into the middle cup.

We use blue and yellow dye to make the color green in the middle cups. Since this one was taking a bit longer, we decided to try a few more times.

This time we used smaller plastic storage containers for sauces, and it worked much better. It didn’t take as long for the water to walk across to the middle cup, and it was still easy to see.

We tried blue and red, but we did those in coffee mugs and could not see the results well at all. And the color that it made was bluer than it was purple. Guess we shouldn’t have used the mugs. It’s all an experiment.

For more specific instructions on how to do the experiment if you would like to check out this site: Rainbow Walking Water Science Experiment for Kids (funlearningforkids.com).

My kids enjoyed this experiment. It does take a little time for the middle cup to fill up, so if you have a younger child who can’t sit still you can always bring them back to check out what happened later.

Definitely give it a try!