Walking Water

What is the walking water experiment? It’s an activity involving six cups, three food colourings, some water, and towel papers. This experiment helps your children or students learn about water, the life-sustaining liquid, using this simple yet magical walking water experiment. If you’ve been looking for a way to introduce your children or students to basic science concepts through hands-on discovery that will really WOW them, the walking water experiment is definitely one to try.

As soon as you place the towel paper in the cups, you should see that it starts to absorb some of the water. Water goes up the towel paper and defies gravity in a process called capillary action. Paper towels are made of many small fibres that have gaps in between them. Water gets pulled into these gaps by capillary action. The water goes up the paper towel and down into the empty glass.

The learning outcome of this experiment is that children or students know about the action that happened in the walking water experiment called capillary action. This is the movement of a liquid through or along the surface of another material in spite of other forces, such as gravity. So, it can show children or students how water can defy gravity with capillary action.

The playful aspects of this experiment are children or students learning about capillary action. They can see the water going up the paper towel and down into the empty glass. As the water travels from one cup to the other, the colours mix. This is also a prime opportunity to teach some art fundamentals: primary and secondary colours. The three primary colours are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colours are shades you can make from the three primary colours and it turns out orange, green and purple.

The materials that we used in this experiment are reusing the bottles, not spending much money to buy things, and economic. This experiment is easy to do because there are not many things to waste, and anyone can do this experiment anytime and anywhere without needing a lot of space.