Our budding young scientists this week looked at chromatography, where we attempted to separate the colours from felt tip pens. We drew on a piece of filter paper, then used a pipette to drop some water near the colour. We watched as the water was drawn up through the ink. This made the colour ‘run’, or travel. We then saw that the pen was made up from different colour pigments because some parts of the colour moved more slowly than others. We investigated which felt tip pens were made up from a mixture of other colours. Our favourites were black and grey. We used this technique to make flower pictures. You can easily try this at home using kitchen towel.
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