Bleeding art tissue paper has been around forever but the ideas you can do with it is just endless. I wanted to try a little science experiment with my class and so we started by making our own watercolor and ended with a simple watercolor science experiment…
Making watercolors
To make our own watercolors, each child began by pouring a very small amount of water into two clear plastic cups…
Then each child selected two different color squares of bleeding tissue paper….
After each child chose their two colors of tissue paper squares, they wadded it up and pushed each square down into its own cup of water. Then the children used a craft stick to swish the tissue paper around in the water…
As the children stirred the bleeding tissue paper around in the water, the water changed to the same color…
Watercolor science
Now that the children had two colors of water each, the children folded a paper towel into a long strip (3 fold). Folding in itself is a lesson for young children but most of my students were able to fold their paper towel by watching me fold an example…
Once everyone had their paper towel folded into a long skinny strip, then I printed their names in the center and invited the children to place one end of the strip in one color of water and the other end of the strip in their other cup of water…
Then I asked the children to tell me what they could see happening and what they thought would happen to the paper towel. In very simple terms, we talked about how the colored water is being absorbed by the paper towel and will soon crawl all the way up to the middle of their names…
We had about an hour left of school so we went on with our day and when we came back to our classroom, the children were super excited to see if their names were now all colorful…
The color hadn’t completely crawled up all the way yet so our science experiment will continue when the children return back to school. Â Once the children do return, we will gently open up our paper towels and hang them to dry then I will set out the colored water for the children to paint with…
This process was simple by design and yet it took lots of guidance for the children to complete. For those of you who have younger students, just making the water change colors with the tissue paper is a fun process by itself! Â Oh and yes, we did have a few cups of water tipped along the way but no worries, we just wiped up the spills and moved on.
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