science for tinies: light and color
Jan. 31st, 2011 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraProject: Flashlight Colors
Materials: flashlight, dark room, colored plastic
Explanatory details: Shine the flashlight through the plastic, get colors! We used one of my childhood toys, three pieces of sturdy transparent plastic, red, yellow, and blue respectively, attached together so that they can overlap in any combination (this is hard to describe, but it's a really nifty item), but you could use any suitable plastic - cut a pair of old 3-D glasses in half for red and blue, perhaps.
How did it go: Great! I got two loads of laundry put away while she played with it.
Things we talked about: The light on its own was white, but shone through the red plastic, it was red, etc. We could make green with yellow and blue together or purple with blue and red together. (Orange doesn't really work with this particular toy, it just looks red.) If you put a wooden block over the flashlight it turned the light off entirely, if you put a T-shirt over it, it got dim but you could see the light through it.
What Junie got out of it: She wasn't into testing different things to see what would happen if you put them over the light, although she did do the block a couple of times. She was quite interested in trying the different primary colors and in making purple, which she was able to do herself (after the initial demo) with some prompting.
Materials: flashlight, dark room, colored plastic
Explanatory details: Shine the flashlight through the plastic, get colors! We used one of my childhood toys, three pieces of sturdy transparent plastic, red, yellow, and blue respectively, attached together so that they can overlap in any combination (this is hard to describe, but it's a really nifty item), but you could use any suitable plastic - cut a pair of old 3-D glasses in half for red and blue, perhaps.
How did it go: Great! I got two loads of laundry put away while she played with it.
Things we talked about: The light on its own was white, but shone through the red plastic, it was red, etc. We could make green with yellow and blue together or purple with blue and red together. (Orange doesn't really work with this particular toy, it just looks red.) If you put a wooden block over the flashlight it turned the light off entirely, if you put a T-shirt over it, it got dim but you could see the light through it.
What Junie got out of it: She wasn't into testing different things to see what would happen if you put them over the light, although she did do the block a couple of times. She was quite interested in trying the different primary colors and in making purple, which she was able to do herself (after the initial demo) with some prompting.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 12:13 am (UTC)Here's an idea: try dripping food coloring into a container of water and watch how it moves and eventually diffuses.
Could also mix colors, of course.
Relatedly, for later (or even now), do you have a prism?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 03:01 am (UTC)