Today in Crazy 8s, the kids dove into the math behind light and color! They discovered how mirrors reflect images and created tricks of the eyes with letters and words. Then, they grabbed their flashlights to see reflection in action—watching light bounce off mirrors at the same angle at which it hit. To wrap it up, the kids experimented with color, exploring how light transforms what we see!
Best of all, the kids got to take home these new tools. Next time the power goes out, you have a flashlight ready to go!
Party Fun Fact: White light is made of 3 primary colors, and they are NOT red, yellow and blue. They are red, green and blue. If you doubt this, take 3 equal-strength flashlights, and put clear blue cellophane over one, green over the 2nd and red over the 3rd. If you shine all 3 at the same spot, you’ll get white light!
Even better, if you overlap just 2 flashlights’ beams:
- Red + blue makes magenta, a nice hot purply pink
- Red + green makes yellow, which is so weird
- Green and blue make cyan, a beautiful light turquoise
And BOOM, guess what: magenta, yellow and cyan are the colors of ink in your printer! Mind explosion!
Everything we grown-ups learned in nursery school about red, yellow and blue is wrong. Those are NOT the primary colors. That’s why when you mix red and blue Playdoh, you don’t get purple – you get this murky color. That’s because they’re the wrong colors to mix!
Even more mind-blowing is what happens when you mix magenta, yellow and cyan light. If you lay translucent plastic squares of these colors on top of each other:
- Magenta + yellow overlap will be red
- Yellow + cyan overlap will be green
- Magenta + cyan overlap will be blue
…we end up right back at our primary colors of light. If you need additional cellophane squares to try these at home, check out Amazon.com or art supply websites.
