Color Swirling Milk Experiment

Harper and I love to explore the kitchen when we need crafty inspiration. She is totally my partner in crime when it comes to creativity!

We were looking for a quick activity on a busy day, because even a busy day should have time for fun and exploration when you are 5! We found ourselves in the kitchen, again, to fuel our inspiration.

This is such a fun way to explore kitchen science and how dish soap works! You need only 4 things to make color swirling milk!

Supplies:

• Milk Use Vitamin D or 2% milk,
• Half and half or heavy cream provide even better results if you have it!
• Food Coloring
• Q Tips
• Dish Soap

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Directions:

1. Pour milk into a glass dish
2. Add several drops of food coloring to the milk.
3. Dip a q tip in dish soap 
4. Dip the q tip into the milk
5. And watch the colors swirl!

Why this works:

Milk has fat in it. The higher the milk fat content, the better this reacts. You can see the power of a concentrated dish soap before your eyes as the dish soap works to break down the fat content of the milk, thus disrupting the splashes of color, causing them to swirl.

What Harp thought:
Harp is a milk drinker, so she was ready to combine early science with her snack. She is intrigued by food coloring, so this was completely up her alley.

As you can see in the photos, she was ready to get hands on with this right away! She was completely intrigued by how the dish soap reacted to the milk. We tried this several times with different colors. We also tried this with skim milk and coffee creamer to see how the dish soap reacted to other milk products


 This is a fun way to engage the little ones with kitchen science, and I would highly recommend trying it with your kids sometime soon as it is so simple!

If you like colorful kids activities, you won't want to miss these glow in the dark nightlights.
This glow in the dark necklace is another fun project that my kids loved.