Colour mixings and all the fixings!

So we got into colours and colour mixing lately. I've been busy slowly building and introducing new and different discovery bottles lately. The latest ones I made were about mixing colours. I used a Gatorade bottle and filled it up halfway with water and yellow food colouring and the other half was blue lamp oil. Oil and water don't mix so the 2 colours stay separate. When the child shakes the bottle the colours mix into green and then slowly separate again. How neat! A few of the kids were exploring How the 2 colours combine and make the new one. I was asking them questions and thought, hey. Why not take this up a notch. So we brought our exploration to the guided table and brought out the food colouring. 

I filled a water bottle up with water so we had it at the table with us. I grabbed a stack of these small clear cups ($6.99 at party city for a huge sleeve of them) and poured a small about of each food colour into 3 cups (red, yellow, blue). Here is where I got REALLY smart. I put a few Q-tips in each of the food colouring cups. That eliminated the potential pouring mess of the children pouring food colour (eeeeek), made it easier to see the colour (on the end of the white Q-tip), doubled as their stir stick and gave them the perfect amount of food colouring to play with. I added some writing to this activity by having the children first write the colours that they wanted to mix. They then poured a little bit of water into the cup and chose their food-colour-saturated q-tip.

Mrs. K came up with a great idea to preserve their colour mixing by pouring a bit of the water onto each of the words. Then the puddles dried and we could see which colours they made.

We extended this activity later in the week kind of by accident. We read the book "sky colour" during library since we are working our way through the silver birch books. We decided to run with the colour theme a bit deeper and actually got out some paints. We only gave the children red, yellow, blue, and white on a paper plate. They each got 1 paint brush, their own tiny clear cup of water and 3 tiny clear cups to colour mix in. 

One of the children accidentally dropped his paintbrush on his paper and it made a red line. He shrugged and said "oops, that's okay, I will make it into a rainbow!" I just loved that.

Do you have any other ideas to expand on this?