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.