Colour Changing Flower (Science at Home)

This is a super simple and fun experiment to do at home – traditionally people do this experiment with white carnations – as the contrast and result is so striking and really obvious. But we were in middle of our school holidays, the kids were a little bored and we had some daffodils in the garden. So with my Red Ted Art hat on, I thought – hey.. how about showing the way water travels in a flower AND explore yet more colour theory?

So the experiment:

Colour Theory

Materials: daffodils (or carnations, if you want to stay traditional), food colouring, water and a glass

We tried blue and red water. What would happen with the blue water and the yellow flower? What with red and yellow?

Sadly the red water flower shrivelled up (I think I added too much food dye and it didn’t fair too well, we tried again with more diluted red colour and it worked better, but I forgot to photograph it – lesson: don’t poison your flower with too much dye!).

Flower colour changingAnd hooray! We have some green patterns on blue water flower. Showing how water travels up the stem, into the petals and how yellow and blue make green. Wonderful.

This took us 10minutes to set up – if that. It was a great little distraction during the holidays and I KNOW we will be trying out this experiment again – with different flowers etc over the years.

Remember these sort of experiments are great to do over and over again, as the kids WILL forget and they WILL enjoy seeing it happen again.

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