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St. Patrick’s Day Science Projects

Looking for ways to incorporate Saint Patrick’s Day themed science experiments into your March lesson planning? Try these five experiments with your kids to inspire their love for hands-on science discovery.

Color-Changing Flowers

Have you ever seen bright green flowers around Saint Patrick’s Day? In this project, you’ll get to dye some yourself and also learn a little about how flowers live in the process.

What You Need:

  • fresh white carnations, mums, or other all-white flowers
  • green food coloring
  • jar or vase of water

What You Do:

transpiration to dye flowers

1. Add at least 15-20 drops of food coloring to the container of water and mix it well. The more coloring you add to your water, the more the color will show up in your flowers, so make sure you use plenty!

2. Cut about a half inch off the end of each flower’s stem at an angle. Making a fresh cut at an angle will allow the flowers to absorb more water.

transpiration to dye flowers

3. Place the flower stems into the colored water and observe how the petals look. They are pure white, right?

4. After about an hour, check on the flowers. Have the petals changed at all?

transpiration to dye flowers

5. Leave the flowers alone for several more hours and check on them periodically. After a full 24 hours, the petals should have quite a bit of green on them.

What Happened:

You probably know that plants “drink” water from soil through their roots, and it in turn travels up the plant’s stem or trunk (in the case of a tree) and to its leaves, flowers, or fruit. This process is called transpiration and it helps plants cool off. When a flower’s stem is cut off of the plant it grew on, the stem is still able to suck water up to keep the flower alive for a little longer, even though it no longer has roots attached to it.

How does that happen? Well, it works sort of like sucking on a straw to get a drink from your glass to your mouth. When water in the flower’s petals and leaves evaporates, it pulls more water up the stem to replace the water that evaporated. How does the evaporating water pull more water up with it? Water has a special property, called cohesion, that causes it to stick to itself. Water moves through tiny tubes in the stem called xylem (say ZYE-lum). Because of cohesion, each drop of water pulls another drop along behind it, effectively moving water up the stem and into the flower.

Adding green dye to the water allowed us to see how water travels from the flower’s roots, up its stem, and then transpires (or evaporates) at its petals. As a bonus, you get pretty green flowers you can use as decoration for St. Patrick’s Day!

When you’re done enjoying your colored flowers, ask an adult to slice upwards through the stem of one to see the tiny tubes full of green dye and how the colored water traveled up the stem to change the color of the flower’s petals.

Rainbow Rockets

In this project you can make a simple rocket and fuel it by a chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide. Make sure you launch these messy rockets outside!

What You Need:

  • 4 Clear film canister (the kind where the cap fits inside the canister, rather than over the outside. See if a local photography shop has any extras they can give you. )
  • Food coloring
  • Alka-Seltzer tablets
  • Water
  • White poster board

What To Do:

  1. The film canister is the engine of your rocket.
  2. Turn the rocket upside-down and fill the canister 1/4 full with water.
  3. Add 2 drops off food coloring to each canister
  4. Add half of an Alka-Seltzer tablet
  5. Snap the lid on
  6. Turn the rocket over and back away. 3-2-1 blast off!

What Happened:

The Alka-Seltzer reacts with water to produce carbon dioxide. When enough carbon dioxide is produced to create pressure on the inside of the canister, it will force the lid to pop off so the gas can escape. As the gas escapes the rocket is propelled upward.

Try to measure how high your rocket goes compared to a nearby fence or a tree. Try it several times; do you get the same results each time? Does the rocket go higher if you add more or less water? Why do you think this is? What happens if you change the design of your fins or nose cone?

Check out more Rocket Science Projects.

Walking Rainbow

What you need:

  • Six jars or beakers of equal sizes
  • Food coloring in primary colors (red, yellow, and blue)
  • Paper towels

What You Do:

  1. Take three jars and add about 20 drops of a primary color in each
  2. Fill the jars with food coloring with water
  3. Arranged your jars in a circle with an empty jar in between each filled jar.
  4. Tear 6 paper towels (if your paper towels have full size sheets, you will need to tear them in half)
  5. Fold each paper towel length-wise into quarters
  6. Put one end of the paper towel submerged in the colored water of one full jar and one end was in an empty jar. This will mean that each jar has two paper towel ends in it. All the jars should connect in a little circular paper towel circuit.
  7. Watch over the next 90 minutes

Science Lesson:

What happened to the empty jars? What color was the water that filled the empty jars? As the water travels up the paper strip (similar to capillary action in plants), it pulls the colored water up the paper towel.

Paper towels are made from plant fibers called cellulose.  In our walking rainbow, the water was pulled upward through the tiny gaps between the cellulose fibers. The attractive forces between water and cellulose fibers make this possible.

Rainbow Explosion

What you need:

  • Whole Milk
  • Food dye
  • Pipette
  • Dish Soap
  • Shallow dish

What you do:

  1. Pour milk into the shallow dish
  2. Add 3-4 drops of each color of food dye
  3. Use the pipette to drop a drop of soap

The Science:

Soap molecules consist of a hydrophilic (water-loving) end and a hydrophobic (water-fearing) end. The fat molecules in the milk are nonpolar molecules, so they cannot dissolve in the polar molecules of water.

When soap is mixed in with the fat and water, the hydrophobic end of the soap molecule breaks up the nonpolar fat molecules. The hydrophilic end of the soap molecule links up with the polar water molecules. As the soap connects fat and water, like a bridge, the nonpolar fat molecules can be carried by the polar water molecules. The food coloring get pushed around everywhere resulting in a colorful explosion!

Make A Rainbow

What You Need:

  • a clear square or rectangular baking dish
  • a handheld mirror
  • water
  • a flashlight (with a normal bulb rather than an LED)
  • a white wall or sheet of paper
  • sticky-tack or modeling clay

What You Do:

1. Fill the baking dish about two-thirds full with water.

2. Carefully set the mirror in the bottom at an angle. You may find it helpful to use a small piece of modeling clay or sticky tack to hold it in place.

refraction rainbow

3. Position the pan and mirror so that the mirror reflects toward a white wall. (Or ask a helper to hold a sheet of white paper about six inches from the mirror.

4. Turn off the lights in the room. Turn on your flashlight and shine it through the water directly at the mirror.

refraction rainbow

5. Can you find the rainbow on the wall or sheet of paper? You may need to adjust the angle of your flashlight or the mirror to get it to appear brightly.

What Happened:

How did the pan of water with a mirror in it make a rainbow on your wall? The water in the dish caused the beam of light from your flashlight to bend. This is called refraction. When white light (like the kind from a flashlight’s bulb) refracts, all of the colors it is made up of become visible! You couldn’t see the different colors until they hit the mirror and were reflected back out of the water as a rainbow! Note that the rainbow may not have had a bow shape like ones you would see in the sky. That’s because a natural rainbow in the sky is actually a full circle, but unless you are above the rainbow, you can only see half of it.

Something similar sometimes happens after a thunderstorm; but instead of the water being in a dish and a flashlight making the light, the water is in the form of droplets in the air (often in clouds) and the light comes from the sun! Beams of sunlight hit drops of water in the sky and are refracted (separated into their colors) and reflected back out, allowing us to see a rainbow if we’re at the right angle.

Science Lessons

Colorful Light

White light, like the kind from a flashlight, is actually made up of seven different colors! Rainbows are formed when light refracts, or breaks apart into its separate colors. Do you know the colors of a rainbow? The colors of a rainbow are always in the same order. You can remember them by saying the name “Roy G. Biv,” which stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Here’s how refraction works to make a rainbow in the sky:

You can see a rainbow when the sun is low in the sky behind you and there is rain off in the distance in front of you. Beams of light from the sun shine towards the rain in the air and when the light goes into the raindrops, it is bent (refracted). When the light bends, it breaks into all of its colors (the colors of the rainbow).

When the light hits the back of the raindrop, it is reflected and bounces back in the opposite direction (back towards you). Each color leaves the raindrop at its own angle, different from all the others. The colors of light bounce back to your eyes and form a half-circle shape, because of their different angles, and you see a rainbow of all the colors!

The colors of the rainbow always appear in the same order because each color always bends at the same angle. The red angle is reflected into your eye at the top, violet at the bottom, and the others at their specific place in between.

Pot of Gold

Have you ever heard that there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Since a rainbow is a visual reflection of light rather than a physical object, you can never really get to the end of one. As you begin to move towards it, the rainbow will move with you and will eventually disappear altogether. (Remember how the angle of the sunlight and raindrops combine in order for you to see a rainbow? When that is thrown off, you will no longer be able to see the rainbow!)

Gold is a pure element that occurs naturally in various places on Earth. Gold is the only metal that naturally has a yellowish color – other elements only take on a yellow color after reacting with different substances. Even though it is a heavy substance, it is very malleable, which means it can be stretched and formed into other shapes fairly easily. In fact, because it is so malleable, pure gold can be pounded into a very thin sheet or stretched into a thin wire or thread! Besides having a high value as money, gold is used to make many things, from jewelry to medals and awards to decorations.

Science Words

Refraction—when light bends because it passes through a different material like when it goes from air into glass or water.

Reflection—when light hits an object and bounces back in the opposite direction. A reflection could also mean an image, such as a reflection of yourself in a mirror or a puddle of water.

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