STEM Colour Experiment – Study with Pink

This week our #TeachECE (Eary Childhood blogging group) is all about Colour, and we’re carrying on with our STEM themed activities with an experiment with paint to discover the colour pink. My daughter like many has a favourite colour and it at the moment appears to be pink, she recently got very upset when I restocked our ready mixed paints as I hadn’t brought any Pink paint for her paintings just red, blue, yellow, black and white. To prevent the meltdown it was time for an investigation into Pink.

Materials needed

Pencil
Two cups or yoghurt containers
Plastic Spoon
White Paper
Paint Brush

Learning Objectives

• Investigate tints
• Measure and pour
• Make predictions and conclusions based on observation and prior knowledge.

Study with Pink

Start off with a question prompt – this is a lovely art piece but we’re looking at it from a STEM point of view. So we need a question to investigate

How do we make pink?

It comes from a paint bottle, we add water to it so it makes it lighter, we use white paper and not a lot of paint. I prompted with the question how do we make green or purple or orange or even brown.

We mix colours together. Lets mix red and another colour together like – she looked at the bottles of paint infront of us – not red and yellow – that’s orange, not red and blue – that’s purple, red and black would make it dark so it must be red and white.

I set up the experiment to determine what makes pink below

• Pour white paint into one cup and red paint into the other
• Add a spoon into the white paint
• On the white piece of paper draw some objects down the page – we drew flowers

Explain that you are going to paint in one flower and then add a spoon of white to the red and paint the next flower, another spoon etc… down the page.

She started to paint first the red flower and then added some white spooning it across. Mixing it up

And painting the next flower – LOOK IT’S STILL RED WE WERE WRONG!

After persuading her to continue we carried on measuring out the white paint 1 spoon at a time mixing and painting the next flower.

Down at the end of the painting she still insisted that it was red and not pink so we added in another spoon of white paint and then painted the background of the white paper.

As we moved up towards where less white had been spooned in she suddenly said “WOW it’s PINK – White and Red really make Pink”

We then looked at the finished painting – and tried to draw some conclusions.

• White and Red make PINK
• The more white you add to the red the more pink it becomes
• When you get pink you can then add more white to make a lighter pink

On our painting, I added pencil annotations of it when dry to say how many spoons were added for each flower that she painted as a way of recording the experiment results.

Adaptions for different abilities

Depending on your child’s ability here are some further suggestions

• Mix primary colours to make secondary colours – red and blue to make purple, red and yellow to make orange, yellow and blue to make green.
• Use the same method to see how you make a tertiary colour like brown – add in smaller quantities of the colours and create different shades of brown
• Use black instead of white and smaller quantities to create shades of the colour instead of tints.
• Challenge your child to see whether they could make Pink red again. Use a paint brush to measure and transfer the colours otherwise you will end up with a LOT of Pink and Red paint.

More colour based learning activities

Rhyming Activity: Crayon Color Chant by Growing Book by Book

Roll a Color Alphabet Game by Mom Inspired Life

Color Counting Book by Tiny Tots Adventures

“I See a Rainbow” Book-Making by Fun-A-Day

Color Insect DIY Book for Writing Practice by The Educators’ Spin On It

Mouse Paint: Learning About Colors in Preschool by The Preschool Toolbox Blog

Free Color Sorting Mats with Spinners by Life Over C’s

Colors Snap Cube Pattern Matching by Learning 2 Walk

What Color Am I? Kindergarten Guessing Game by Capri + 3

Fine Motor Color Sorting Activity by Munchkins and Moms

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