Cars can paint?

This week we did two different projects together. The first one was another color science project. I posted before about my color mixing with ice cubes.

This time I gave the boys slips of paper towel. They were asked to draw a circle on the paper towel about 1/3 of the way up. We decided to do red, yellow, blue, green, orange and purple. Each slip was then placed into a short tumbler glass with a few inches of water inside it. You want the color to be at the top of the glass and not in the water itself. This way the water can wick up the paper towel at it's own rate.


We let this "do it's thing" while we went onto the next step. I gave each of the boys a paper towel and told them to draw a design on the paper towel with markers. We then folded the paper towel into quarters and dipped the corners into water. This allowed the water again to wick through the marker. (This is a math skill, folding the towel in half, and in half again in the other direction)


(you can see my towel in the foreground of this picture, I didn't get a good picture of either of the boys designs... oops!)

We then went back and looked at the paper towel slips and this is the results:

You can see the yes they did spread as expected, but notice the green one split into blue and yellow. The purple showed varied shades of purple running up and down. Actually the blue marker bled out purple and another shade of blue too.

The boys really enjoyed this project, but the next one they enjoyed even more!

Earlier in the week I mentioned this project in my post about Process vs. Product, so I decided to do it with the boys. I'd done it with Blake when he was younger, but never with both boys.


I gave each boy a cookie sheet and three cars. In the corners of the cookie sheet I put paint. Then they drove the cars through the paint and onto the paper. They had a blast doing it. They both did 3 pictures and played at it for over 30 minutes. I actually framed two of the pictures and have them in my living room.

I hope you are enjoying these projects. I hope you decide to try these or other projects with your children not only during the summer, but through the school year too. Tune in next week for more fun!