What happens when milk, food colouring and dish soap are mixed?
Is your school kid bored with her chemistry lessons? Well, she doesn’t have to be if you help her with a cool chemistry experiment at home. Experiment with colours can be a great way to get your child interested in this subject. Here is an interesting one to try with your little one at home.
The Milk Magic
This experiment shows how colours explode when milk, food coloring, and dish soap mix together. In a chemical reaction to the dish detergent, the colours sink initially. However, they emerge after a while, mixing and churning together and spreading away. At the end, when the chemical reaction stops, the colours stabilize, taking interesting shapes and patterns.
What you need
- Baking dish with a flat bottom
- Milk
- Food coloring
- Dish detergent
Steps
- Have your child pour milk in the baking dish, filling an inch of it.
- The next step is to add plenty of colourful dots with food coloring. Encourage your little one to make numerous patterns, according to their choice.
- At the end, just a drop of baking soda needs to be added to the milk.
Milk Magic Explained
Fat, protein, sugars, vitamins, and minerals are the different molecules that milk is loaded with. Dish detergent, when introduced to milk, stirs up a whirlwind of reactions in these molecules. So, a lot of things happen all at once as the food coloring starts flowing through the milk. The protein molecules in the milk react with the detergent which changes their shape and sets them up in motion. Dish soaps form micelles to clean dirty utensils. The same thing happens when the fat molecules of milk come in contact with detergent pushing the food colouring around and creating a swirl. Finally, the solution reaches an equilibrium and the movement stops.
Other colour experiments to try
Encourage your kids to try other interesting experiments with colours at home. These STEM projects will not only enhance their knowledge in science, but also give wings to their imagination. Here ae some fun ideas to try at home:
- Rainbow in a jar
- Colour changing flowers
- Fizzing Colours
- Crayon Candles