Celery Experiment

If you ever have some celery lying around that's too old to eat, this is a great experiment you can do with it. 

Supplies: celery, food colouring, glasses, spoon

The celery has to have leaves on the top or the experiment won't really work. 

Fill the glasses up about halfway with water. 

Drop some food colouring into each glass. I kept it simple and used just the primary colours, but you'll see below that the yellow doesn't work too great, so mixing to make other colours would work too. 

Monkey loves squeezing the food colouring. I'm all for giving him as much independence as possible, but I still do this with him because he'd do twenty drops instead of just five! 

He stirred each glass to make sure the colour was all mixed up. 

The last step is to put one piece of celery into each glass. I asked Monkey what he thought would happen to the celery. He said, "They will be blue and yellow and red." 

Then, you wait! In my experience, it's best to leave the celery overnight to get good results. We put this together on Friday and then went up to the cottage for the weekend, so we didn't get to see our results until Sunday. Monkey had forgotten all about our experiment so he was really excited when he saw it! 

You can see that the yellow didn't work too well (it's slightly better in person, you can tell it's been coloured) but the blue and red look great! The celery was pretty wilted before but after being in the water it perked right up. 

I find simple experiments like this are great for teaching sequencing. You can review the steps of the experiment quickly. For example: First we... Then we... Last we... 

Mar