I am always late to a party, so I have to confess I have never made a Skittles rainbow. I have seen other people do it, and vidoes and it’s been on my list of things to do for ages and my kids both did it as part of their science classes at school but have been nagging me for ages for us to do it at home. It’s a fun way to teach kids about colours, absborption and dissolving and how colours mix. It’s very cheap, simple to set up and produces spectactular results. Now we have done it, I feel like we could keep doing it.
All you need is a white plate or dish with a flat base, some Skittles, and a small amount of boiling water.
You arrange the Skittles on your surface, and then pour a little boiling water over them, and watch the magic happen.
You can see from our video here how easy it is to do. The teen set it up and did a rather impressive time-lapse video for me, she is very clever at that sort of thing and far better than me at doing videos.
This is a fun thing to do with kids of any age, whether you are just wanting something simple to do with them, or you want to try and talk about colours and science. The only problem you may end up with is squabbling over the left over Skittles and who gets to eat them. We incorparate sharing and fairness into our making a Skittles Rainbow activity and everyone gets the same amount to eat.
This rather spectacular photo is what they look like up close when the experiment is ending. It’s quite eye-catching, isn’t it?
Have you tried this? If not, why not, it’s easy and a lot of fun and you get to eat the leftovers, that can’t be bad…
Ahh! This is such fun! We did it a few years ago and my girls loved it. The end result looks so pretty x
We need to do it again, it was a lot of fun