SCIENCE AT HOME

Welcome to our new Science at Home page.
Each week there will be a new experiment perfect for the whole family to do at home.

Walking Water

​Equipment:

• 5 identical glasses
• Kitchen Paper
• Food Colouring - red, yellow and blue ( you can use just red and yellow - reduce glass to 3)​​

Method:

1. ​Place your five identical glasses about 5 cm apart.
2. Half fill the first, third and fifth glass with water.
3. Add a few drops of red food colouring to the first glass, add yellow to the third glass and add blue to the fifth glass.
4. Stir the food coloring until the water is one color.
5. Take a piece of kitchen paper and fold it long ways until it is approximately 3 cm wide.
6. Place one end of the kitchen paper into the colored water and the other end into the empty glass. Continue this in all the glasses as illustrated.
7. Leave for one hour.
8. Return to the glass and observe what happened.

Recreate and complete this experiment sheet before you begin. Click image below.

Here comes the Science bit.....
The colored water travels up the kitchen paper by a process called capillary action. Capillary action is the ability of a liquid to flow upward, against gravity, in narrow spaces.  This is the same thing that helps water climb from a plant’s roots to the leaves in the tree tops.

Kitchen Paper, and all paper products, are made from fibers found in plants called cellulose.  In this demonstration, the water flowed upwards through the tiny gaps between the cellulose fibers.  The gaps in the kitchen paper acted like capillary tubes, pulling the water upwards.
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The water is able to defy gravity as it travels upward due to the attractive forces between the water and the cellulose fibers.

Why not try this experiment which shows Capillary Action in plants?