Chromatography lesson plan

Hello everyone!

Some weeks ago I talked about the amazing school in NZ where I did my internship period. While there I planned and taught some art and science based lessons to a 6 and 7-year-old group. The students named that time of the week when I taught “Marta’s time” which I loved. For them it was some sort of “fun time”. Every lesson starts with a story to help them guess what it will be about. This was something that really worked with them.

Today I will share with you the first two lessons, where we experimented chromatographies. This experiment is super cool and they can learn a lot with it. We repeated the experiment in the second lesson, trying to improve it.

This is the lesson plan:

First lesson:

Main aim: Students will experiment how colours are made.

Secondary aim: Students will respect their turns.

Cross-curricular aim: Students will get an idea of which colours they need to mix to get new ones. This will be useful in art projects.

Materials: Book “The day the crayons quit”, plastic plates with some water, kitchen paper, markers and a computer with a projector.

Procedure:

Lead-in (10 min)

The teacher reads the book “The day the crayons quit” while the students sit on the mat.

After the story the teacher tells them they will do a science experiment related with the story and makes them guess what they will do. Some other questions that can be asked are:

• Do you know what is inside markers?
• Do you know how different colours are made?

Explanation and preparation (10 min)

The students get the instructions while sitting on the mat. The instructions are projected on the screen as well as explained.

To make sure the students understood what has to be done, the teacher asks some students to explain the activity.

The strips of kitchen paper and the markers are put on a table, and the plates are distributed between the other tables.

Experiment (30 min)

Each student chooses three markers and gets three strips of kitchen paper.

They go to one of the tables and do their chromatographies.

Follow-up (10 min)

The students sit on the mat. The whole class comments the experiment. Some of the questions the teacher could ask are the following:

• What happened when we put the paper strips in the water?
• What colours did you use? / What colours did you get?
• Why are the colours that appear different?
• Why some ink goes higher than others?

Second lesson:

Main aim: Students will reflect on how they can improve the results of the experiment.

Secondary aim: Students will create chromatographies with different colours.

Cross-curricular aim: Students will get an idea of which colours they need to mix to get new ones. This will be useful in art projects.

Materials: Book “The day the crayons came home”, plastic plates with some water, kitchen paper, markers and a computer with a projector.

Procedure:

Lead-in (15 min)

The teacher reads the book “The day the crayons came home” while the students sit on the mat.

The teacher asks what do they think they will do, as the book read is the second part of the book read at the beginning of the previous lesson.

We try to remember which were the steps of the experiment.

We all discuss how can we improve the experiment:

• Showing them some good examples and asking them how do they think it has to be done to get a good result.
• What did they do that make the colour disappear (dip it all in the water).
• What colour should the water be after doing it (no colour in it).
• What is the best way of colouring the rectangle.

Experiment (35 min)

Each student chooses three markers (they can be the same or different from the previous week) and gets three strips of kitchen paper.

They go to one of the tables and do their chromatographies.

Follow-up (10 min)

The students sit on the mat. The whole class comments the experiment. Some of the questions the teacher could ask are the following:

• What happened when we put the paper strips in the water?
• What colours did you use? / What colours did you get?
• Why are the colours that appear different?
• Why some ink goes higher than others?

This is how the cromatographies looked:

Have you tried this experiment with your kids? Have you read the books “The day the crayons quit” and “The day the crayons came home”? I think these books are great to introduce this experiment. I really hope you liked this post!

Marta ♥