Colour Detectives

What colours are really inside our felt pens?

This is the question that we asked ourselves as we conducted our experiment.

Students were given a strip of paper kitchen towel and asked to draw a straight line across the paper 2cm up from the bottom of the paper. Students were told that they were going to dip the paper into the water, but before they could do this they needed to make a prediction about what was going to happen. 

After dipping the paper in the water students sat and watched the magic unfold. As the water travelled up the paper it pulled the ink from the felt with it. Students with colour like light blue, yellow and red didn't see any changes to the color of the ink. Students with black, green and dark blue felts noticed something magical happening to the ink...it was splitting into a spectrum of colour. 

Shania wanted to know why the dark blue felt only had the colour spread up the paper, while the dark green and black felt ink spread up and down the paper? We looked at the colour spectrum created by the splitting of the colour in the ink. We noticed that the dark blue pen had purple, indigo and blue colours within its ink. We noticed that the black pen had violet, indigo,blue, green, yellow and red, there was a clearly seen blue line, did this mean that the black had more blue in it? We went back to our diagram of a rainbow to find an answer. What did we notice? That there are no colours under purple on the rainbow, is this why our dark blue felt pen only had colour spreading up the paper? Maybe.

We wonder if we would see the same colour spectrum for these colours in different brands of felt pens.. 

Making some observations

Dipping the paper

How are rainbows made?

Today we extended our understanding of light and colour.

We began the lesson by recapping our previous colour wheel experiment. In that lesson we learnt that if we spin a colour wheel fast enough the colours blend together to create white. Today we discussed that the white we saw in the colour wheel experiment was a nearcreation of white light.

The students were given a prism each and a piece of white paper and asked to make a rainbow. Students learnt several things during this exploration. 

They learnt the following:

1. If somebody was standing infront of their prism, then they were unable to make a rainbow...they needed a light source.

2. They sometimes had to change the angle of the prism to make the rainbow appear. 

3. The order of the colours were the same for all the rainbows made.

We discusses our findings. Students were introduced to the words refraction and spectrum. 

We learnt that white light is refracted by a prism and is split into a spectrum of colours. We made connections with the rainbows we see in the sky and discussed that the raindrops in the atmosphere are acting as prisms. 

Here are some of the rainbows we made.

Some Fantastic Sentences From Room 25

We looked at a picture of a gorilla in a massive green jungle. We had to decide if we wanted to describe the jungle or the gorilla.

Here are some of our best sentences: “The gorilla is as black as a starry night sky.” – Ezekiel “There was a beautiful waterfall with sparkly water, that any animal could drink” – Enobong “The gorilla was as hangry as me” – Ruby “I saw a gorilla and it looked black and white.” – Isaac “The gorilla is as humongous as a dinosaur leg.” – Aleesha “The people should run far, far away from the king of the gorillas.” – Aleesha “The gorilla ran as fast as a cheetah running across an African desert” – Cassidy “The gorilla has shiny little flick in his fur like shining stars.” – Layaan “The gorilla was as strong as the Hulk” – Havana “The gorilla has greedy eyes, like a famished lion.” – Habiba “His big massive muscles bang the Earth like he wants to destroy it, so only his tribe will rule the Earth.” – Kedius “A saw a gorilla that was as fat as Santa.” – Shania “The leaves were as soft as silk” – Amber “I saw silver big ferns, the colour of my dad’s beard.” – Amber “The gorilla’s fur is as black as darkness without light.” – Denise “All the green of the jungle looks like a bunch of leaves on the group” - Jazmine