Capillary Action Day 1

For whatever reason, unknown even to myself, I had the hankering to talk to the kids about capillary action. Maybe it's because I know spring is here and there is much of capillary action happening in the world around us. Maybe not. Either way, I snagged an idea from this website: http://jadaroo.blogspot.com/2011/03/carnation-science-experiment-rainbows.html and decided to give it a go. Here's what Jada Roo (from the website) did: get white carnations, slit stems, submerge in colored water, wait for the water to travel up the stems and into the petals causing the flower to "change color."

It's a pretty swell idea. We tried it and we followed all the directions to the letter. Here's what Jada Roo's experiment looked like:

 and here's what my less than perfect approximation looked like:

Here's what Jada Roo's flowers looked like after waiting a day, (pretty cool, huh?):

Here's what happened after I waited 5 days: I didn't take a picture. That's because I was so mad at this stupid experiment. Only 1 of our flowers changed color, the blue one. We even made a graph to chart the progress of the flowers and everything, but it was all in vain.

I don't have many hypotheses for why my flowers didn't work. I guess they weren't thirsty. My husband suggested maybe my stems were too long. I don't know. I've talked to various people who have reported that they've seen this work, so I know it does. It just didn't work for us--for some reason. Whatever the reason is, I'm mad at it.

Well, at least the flower in blue water worked, allowing the boys and I to have a small discussion about how the blue water travelled up the stem and got into the petals. I ended up drawing a few pictures, as is usually necessary for us. I think they got it. And even if they didn't, they have another chance tomorrow because I found another idea that I like.

Stay tuned. It's riveting.