STEM Preschool Project: Watch White Flowers Change Color

As a mom to a little homeschooler, I’m always looking for educational projects and activities that will teach him valuable lessons and provide him with useful tools, while also managing to hold his age-appropriate short attention span. Children are like little sponges and I never truly give him credit for everything that he grasps and understands when we work on projects together. It always hits me when I listen to him tell his daddy about the experiment. That’s when I realize how much he truly learned. For that reason, I love to do educational hands-on projects with him that incorporate multiple lessons. One of his recent favorites was this STEM exercise where we watched in awe as some white chrysanthemum flowers transformed into a beautiful rainbow bouquet of colors with only a few simple steps of prep. So, let’s get started and we’ll tell you how we did it.

Materials

Several 5oz clear hard, plastic cups
Water
Food coloring
Sharpie marker
Measuring cup with handle and spout
White flowers (chrysanthemums, carnations, etc)
Scissors
Cardboard, wax paper, or some protective liner
Wooden skewers, or a spoon for each color

Hands-on Lessons Practicing:

Fine Motor Skills
Problem Solving
Hand-Eye Coordination
Counting
Color Mixing
…and a basic lesson of how flowers absorb water and transport it.

Step One: Because I’m always looking for ways to incorporate additional educational steps, I decided to let my little guy pour the water into the 5oz cups. To make it a greater learning experience, I drew lines on the cups with black sharpie, about halfway to two-thirds of the way to the top of the cup, and instructed him to pour the water to the black line. If he poured too much, he was told to pour the extra into an empty cup until he got the measurement just right. Because his hands are still little and he couldn’t handle a lot of weight, I used a 4-cup measuring cup (with a spout and handle) with about seven to eight ounces of water in it to let him pour with ease. He had an absolute blast measuring them out and getting the water just right. I was thrilled to watch him work on his fine motor skills, problem solving, and hand-eye coordination. When he didn’t need help, I was busy cutting all of the stems down on the flowers to make sure that they would fit inside a 5oz plastic cup with ease.

Step Two: Before I started the food coloring step, I grabbed a large piece of cardboard and put all of our cups on top of the cardboard. If you plan to have an adult do the food coloring step, you may not need as much protection. I thought this was a great learning opportunity as well, so I opted to let my young guy do it. He was able to practice counting and he also got to experiment with color mixing. I handed him the food coloring one at a time and instructed him to squeeze ten drops into the selected cup. I broke the wooden skewers in half and used them to stir the food coloring and the water together after he had finished. I used a new skewer for each cup, as to not cross-contaminate the colors. Then, we would switch food coloring color and cups and so on and so on until we had a cup for each color in our box. After we had one cup for each color set aside, I let my son experiment with color mixing. If we mix blue and red, what color will it make? What if we mix blue and yellow? What if we mix three colors? I have always been a hands-on learner personally, so I thought this might be a fun way to help him remember how certain colors are made.

Step Three: After we had mixed all of our colors, and we were happy with our cups, we placed all of the cut flowers into the cups, spreading them out as evenly as possible. Then we left them. After only a few hours, you could see some of the flowers changing colors, but by the next morning, they had transformed into a beautiful display of colors. This makes for a great educational moment to discuss what colors transformed the flower the most, the least, and what experimental colors had the prettiest impact.

The final educational conversation that we had was how the flower absorbs the water that it needs and how it transports that water to all of the parts of the plant. My son is pretty young, so our discussion was pretty basic. However, depending on your child’s age, this experiment can start a conversation that goes into a much more detailed description and learning experience.

Even as an adult, I found this experiment fascinating and the results were just beautiful! We proudly displayed our new bouquet for several days on the kitchen counter and got several compliments!