The Disappearing Rainbow. A Magical Experiment.

🎂 4 + years ⏱️ 20 min 📍 Everywhere ⭐ easy

Imagine you paint a colorful rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple – all the colors are there. You proudly hold it in your hands and suddenly, poof, it's gone! Just vanished. Sounds crazy? It is a bit. But that's exactly what you're going to experience today. An experiment that shows how exciting our eyes and light work together. You don't need much. Paper, a plastic sleeve, markers, and a vase of water. And just like that, you create a rainbow that comes and goes as you wish. Plus, at the end, you can proudly say: 'I know how to make a rainbow disappear.' Who can do that? So, roll up your sleeves, grab your materials, and let's get started!

What you'll need

A white sheet of paper
Plastic sleeve
Colorful felt-tip pens or colored pencils
A black permanent marker
A vase of water

How it works

Find a white sheet of paper. On it, paint your rainbow. Stripe by stripe, from red to purple. Make it clear so the colors are visible.
Put your rainbow picture into the plastic sleeve. Take the black permanent marker. Now trace the outline of your rainbow onto the sleeve. Not on the paper! Make sure to trace the arcs neatly. This creates a rainbow framework on the sleeve.
Hold the sleeve in the water. Now look at the whole thing from the front. Well? There it is, your rainbow, shining as always! But now look from above into the water.
Gone! Just magically disappeared! Only the black lines on the sleeve remain. The rainbow is hiding.
The water bends the light. From the front, the light comes in so that you see the colorful colors through the sleeve. But from an angle above, the light is bent differently. The colorful rays hide behind the sleeve. Only the black lines are left.
Because the light bounces off the sleeve, like on a mirror. It doesn't reach the colorful colors behind. They stay hidden. Try something out! What happens if you tilt the sleeve more? Or if you draw other pictures, maybe a heart or an animal?
You see that things can look very different depending on the direction you look from. You learn to observe closely and ask questions, and that makes you smart! And now you even have a trick to amaze others.