Simple Science Experiments: Colorful Celery

Do your kids love to perform science experiments? A really easy one is to make colorful celery! If you’re looking for some simple science experiments, you can’t get much easier than this one!

I am slowly learning to appreciate science. For years, I shied away from it, because it seemed too technical and abstract. But when I was taking biology a couple of years ago in college, I had to do several experiments at home and document my results. That’s when I started appreciating the value of performing experiments for yourself. And my kids love them!

Check out how you can easily learn about plants by making colorful celery!

Simple Science Experiments: Colorful Celery

We got the idea for this experiment from the book 501 Science Experiments. This is definitely a book that will stay with our family for some years. We’ll never run out of science ideas with this one. 🙂

In fact, we’ve had this book for four or five years and I think we’ve done two of the experiments so far. That’s going to change during this school year, though.

All you need for this experiment is a few stalks of celery (with the ends trimmed), a measuring cup, two glasses, and some food coloring.

Fill each glass half full of water. Then add a good amount of red food coloring to one glass and blue food coloring to the other glass. (Really, you could use any colors you want, but I thought red and blue would show up best.)

Leave the glasses out at room temperature for at least 8 hours.

Come back and take a look! If you look closely, you can see that some of the spots inside the celery have taken on the color of the liquid in each glass.

But the best way to observe the results is to peel back the rounded part of the celery stalk. Just peel a tiny amount off, otherwise you’ll take off too much and miss where the liquid moved up the plant.

See? Just like other plants, celery carries water and nutrients up through the stalk in an attempt to bring food to the leaves at the top. Even when you cut the leaves off, the stalk can still transfer nutrients, including the colored liquid.

When you peel back the top layer, you can actually see how the coloring has traveled. Neat!

What simple science experiments do your kids like? Share them in the comments!