Baby mess-free colour mixing experiment

At the end of November, I tried some taste-safe colour mixing with my then 10 month old to help him explore what happens when you mix primary colours together.  He enjoyed mushing the coloured fromage frais around, but it wasn't very brightly coloured.  He enjoys looking at bright colours, and pointing to coloured circles in the book 'Wow said the owl' by Tim Hopgood and the patches on Elmer the Elephant and waiting for us to name the colours.  I thought we could try a different version of colour mixing to try and use brighter colours and also make it mess-free.

For this, I used Crayola washable finger paints - which we already had for my 3 year old, although he steadfastly refuses to entertain the idea of painting with his fingers and instead applies them liberally with a brush - and a sealable sandwich bag.  I squirted a large blob of each of the yellow, red and blue paints into the bag, and then sealed the sandwich bag once I'd got as much air as possible out, and then folded over the sealing end for good measure.  I stuck it down to my son's high chair tray and let him see what he made of it.

He started out pointing to the colours and saying 'da' which is his way of getting us to name the colours.  I duly obliged and then showed him how he could squash them around with his fingers.  He enjoyed it, and was delighted when they touched and formed new colours.  I talked to him about them as he made them, naming the secondary colours as he made them and helping him squash the paint to make green as the blue and yellow were a bit far apart.

Mixing coloured paint, without any mess

It was genuinely mess free, but probably less of an interesting sensory experience than the messier taste-safe version.  Again, it's difficult to tell what he learnt, but he seemed to have fun and it was a nice opportunity to talk to the little one about colours in a different context to our usual books.