Dye in Celery
We were investigating water, doing some experiments involving surface tension, absorbency, paper chromatography, floating, and such. One day we set up beakers with different colors of food dye in water. Each group took a celery stalk, split it part way, and put each end in a beaker (100K jpeg). The next day we took the celery out to see what had happened.
The grade six children worked in groups. At the end, they each gave reports on what they had learned.
In the picture (138K jpeg), you can see three girls in their school uniforms reporting on their dye in celery experiment. They're showing cross-sections of the celery and at least one girl has food dye on her lips:
Chip: Can you tell us how far up the dye went,... how many centimeters?
Rachel: Well, not really. We ate all of it.Each group had cut 1 cm. cross-sections of the stalk to see what it looked like inside. I guess it was just too tempting to have all those brightly-colored, bite-sized celery chunks piled up in front of hungry kids.