Colors in the Bath

For bath time yesterday I got out some color tabs that I had bought at Target. They are little dissolvable tablets that create various colors in your water. I placed 4 clear plastic vases that I had bought from the Dollar store on the ledge of the tub. I then filled them half way with water and let the kids pick which color tab they wanted. Callie chose yellow and blue, and Josh picked yellow and red. They were amazed when I dropped the tablets in and the water turned colors. Now, I had high hopes of making a color mixing lesson out of this. They immediately reached to grab the cups and asked if they could dump them in the water. "Wait" I almost screamed, though I did hold back my voice a little! I could see my grand teaching moment vanishing. I asked Callie to pour some of the blue into the yellow, and she was surprised to see it turn green. After that tiny little educational experience, the cups were dumped into the water. Oh-well, they still had a ball mixing all the water in the tub. I still have more tablets, so we'll pull them out again another time and try the lesson over. It is important for kids to play while learning, so I really didn't have a problem with all the colored water ending up in the tub, I was just hoping to prolong it. :)