Celery Experiment

We had a lot of celery in the house thanks to a recipe so I decided to try the old food coloring & celery experiment with Dylan. I wasn't too sure how he would handle the waiting part. Then my friend, Stacey, gave me the best idea - set it up before nap time. This is exactly what we did and after nap, the results were ready.

I prepped the cups with food coloring and water first. I just squirted in a few drops of each color and stirred them. (Those snowflake cups are the only clear plastic cups we have on hand so they were put to use again!)

Next I explained to Dylan what to do and let him place each celery stick into one of the cups.

A few hours later when we checked, both pieces of celery had colorful veins.

Dylan definitely found this interesting. He was very curious about the colors coming up through the celery and liked stirring the colored water (not part of the experiment - just part of the fun!). I learned a bit myself. After putting yellow food coloring in one of the cups I thought that maybe it wasn't the best choice, but it worked fine. The veins were an orange color and we could see it. Searching online afterward, I discovered that the leaves can also pick up the colors so next time we'll leave those on.