The other day my son asked me how to make the color green. I simply replied “blue and yellow.” No sooner than I could spit the words out I realized that answer would not suffice. He was going to want a better answer than just the colors that make green. We got to talking about primary colors and secondary colors. I explained to him that you cannot make primary colors and that they consist of Red, Yellow, and Blue. With those three colors you can make secondary colors consisting of Purple, Green, and orange.
I also knew that my explanation would need some sort of visual back up (that’s just the way his mind works) so I pondered what I could do other than just break out the crayons. I grabbed my ice-cube trays and filled them up with water. I added a small drop of yellow coloring to 4 of the cubes, a small drop of red to 4 other cubes, and a small drop of blue to the remaining 4 cubes. Four cubes of each of the primary colors. I popped them into my freezer and waited the 45 minutes until they were frozen solid (we have a subZero freezer so it freezes quickly).
Once they were frozen we added two cubes to each of our Ziploc bags and went outside into the hot sun and watched what happened. In the bags we put a yellow and a blue, a blue and a red, and a red and a yellow. The LOVED watching them melt and change into the secondary colors! I had them try to guess what color they thought their bag of cubes would melt into before they began to melt.
All in all it turned out to be a great time because they loved learning about making colors and watching their bags of ice cubes melt. We hope you will give it a try with your kiddies too!
