Color Mixing Factory

My kids could do this activity over and over! Use bleeding tissue paper to create colored water, and then let creativity take over as new colors are mixed together.

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Both of my kids have always enjoyed water based sensory play, especially when it involves color mixing. This invitation to mix colors was such a hit with both ages (2 and 6 years old) and led to lots of conversation and creativity.

What you need:

- large activity tray (the $3 IKEA SMULA tray is perfect)
- second smaller tray (we used a Dollar Tree food tray)
- bowl with water
- jumbo dropper by Learning Resources, smaller pipette by Colorations and a stirrer (ours is from Stop and Shop)
- 6 compartment paint palette
- 6 cup paint pot rack
- bleeding tissue paper stored in a muffin tin

How it works:

The first stage of the activity was to simply use the droppers to fill the small paint cups with water from the bowls on their trays. This was great for fine motor skill development.

The kids couldn't wait for the next part as they have both used bleeding tissue paper before. Simply choose a piece of bleeding tissue paper, scrunch it up and drop it into the cup of water. Straight away the color will start to bleed into the water.

A little tip is to encourage your kids to use their stirrer to help the color run more. My toddler was tempted to use her finger as the stirrer but as you can imagine the color runs everywhere!

Watching the kids excitedly add a different color to each paint cup was so much fun. We spoke about how we could make the colors more vibrant and that prompted them to start adding more bleeding tissue paper to some of their paint cups.

Once they had six different colors of water in their paint cups, it was time to challenge them with a spot of color mixing. I asked them to use their paint pot colors to make six new and unique colors in their empty paint palettes.

This was definitely their favorite part. They used accurate fine motor skills to experiment with adding two, three or even four different colors to one compartment of their palette. They were so excited to name their new colors as well.

An activity like this offers so much opportunity for the freedom to create and explore, minus an expected outcome. They both worked at their own speeds, with big bro racing ahead to begin with but then spending much longer carefully concocting his six new colors. Baby sis was delighted to choose two colors to mix, and was sooooo excited when they made a new color.

Once they filled their paint palette with six new colors, they tipped it back into their bowl and started all over again. And of course there was lots of experimenting with the leftover water and pieces of bleeding tissue paper in their bowls. A really fun set up for encouraging sensory confidence and color mixing exploration across different ages.