Chromatography

Thursday is still an activity you can do in the garden or in a house/flat. You will need: coffee filter paper or kitchen towels, scissors, a few different colours of felt tip pens (we suggest black, green, purple, red), some water in a bowl, a timer (or the ability to count to 60).

Cut the kitchen towel into large pieces (we used 6cm tall by 4cm wide, but any tallish rectangle is fine). On the bottom of the kitchen towel strip, measure 1 cm and make a mark. Now, just above the measurement, draw a block and colour it in with your pen colour. Add a small dot right on the to of the kitchen towel (so you know which colour you used). Repeat the process with each of the pen colours.

Now, get your dish of water. You will need to hold the kitchen towel so that when it is put in the water, the block of pen, does not go into the water - it should be just above it. Start the timer, and hold in the water for 60 seconds. Take out and set to one side to dry. Repeat with all the colours.

Now look, what do you see? You should have seen the pen colour split, so that you get an array of colours -these are the colours used to make the colour you started with. Which one had the most colours - black is usually our favourite, what did you discover?

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