Walking Water Experiment: Rainbow Science for Kids

Walking Water Experiment: Rainbow Science Experiment for Kids

In this post you will learn how to do the walking water or walking rainbow science experiment for kids. You can download the walking water experiment worksheet that goes along with this experiment.

Walking Water or is it Walking Rainbow?

One of the coolest science experiments that really gets the WOW factor is the Walking Water or Walking Rainbow experiment #ivehearditbothways.

I was excited to do this experiment and watch it, and I was not disappointed. I was anxious that it wouldn’t work because I used cheap paper towels, but my cheap paper towels did not disappoint!

Even if you’re not into science, do this experiment. It’s just cool.

You do have to ask your kids to apply a little bit of patience. The water doesn’t walk up right away. But we did other things as we watched the process, and we were amazed every time we checked back to see it.

Here’s how we did it.

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Walking Water Experiment

Supplies:

Paper Towels
Food Coloring
7 Cups (we used disposable plastic cups)
Water
If you want to make it official, you can download the Walking Water Experiment worksheet. (this worksheet simplifies the scientific method for young minds, and asks the right questions for young scientist to think about what is really happening.

Instructions:

Line up your plastic cups in a row, or in a circle. (The circle is pretty cool).

Place water in cups 1, 3, 5, and 7. It works better if you fill it about 3/4 full.

Place food coloring as follows: (make sure the colors are dark, and do the same amount of drops for each color)

Six drops of RED in cup 1.
Six drops of YELLOW in cup 3.
Six drops of BLUE in cup 5.
Six drops of RED in cup 7.

Fold half a sheet of a paper towel 2-3 times long ways so that it’s about an inch wide. (hot dog style, as pictured below) Do this six times to six different paper towels.

Put one end of the paper towel in one of the cups of water, and the other end of the paper towel in its corresponding empty cup. Repeat with each cup of water and empty cup. It should look like the picture below. (If you decide to do a circle, you do not have to connect the red cups with a paper towel).

Observe what the water does. It should slowly start to climb up the paper towel and into the next cup.

It is not a super-fast experiment, it does take a few minutes to get started. It might help to do something else and then look back on it. We checked it about every 10 minutes and it looked different. It was pretty cool.

Here’s what it looked like right away:

After about 10 minutes:

After about 30 minutes:

After about an hour:

All the cups that didn’t have water are now a fourth of the way full. It was super cool to watch.

It was super cool, and the kids wanted to keep checking on it throughout the day. They didn’t want to throw it away. I also thought it was really cool.

Science is just cool.

If you want some more science, check out my science ebook: 13 Easy Science Experiments for Kids with Household Items.