What you need for find a rainbow indoors
- An old CD or a glass of water पुरानी सीडी या पानी का गिलास
- Sunshine and a white wall धूप और सफ़ेद दीवार
Nothing here needs a trip to a shop. If one thing is missing, try the nearest substitute and talk about what changes — that is an experiment too.
How to do it, step by step
- Hold the CD in the sunlight. सीडी को धूप में पकड़ो।
- Tilt it until colours land on the wall. झुकाओ जब तक दीवार पर रंग न पड़ें।
- Name the colours you can see. दिखने वाले रंगों के नाम बोलो।
- Try the glass of water too. पानी के गिलास से भी करो।
On the screen above, the steps come one at a time and are read aloud, so a child who cannot read yet can still follow along on their own while your hands are busy.
Why it happens
White light is all the colours together; the CD spreads them out again. It is the same thing the sky does after rain.
What to say while you do it
Ask "what do you think will happen?" before you start, and let the guess be wrong without correcting it. Afterwards ask "what happened?" and then "why do you think that happened?". Those three questions turn ten minutes of mess into real thinking, and they work for every activity on this site. Children who are asked to predict remember far more than children who are only shown.
Is my child old enough?
This one suits ages 3-6. A younger child can still join in — let them do the pouring, the stirring or the sticking, and do the fiddly part yourself. An older child can run it a second time and change one thing on purpose: more soda, colder water, a bigger sheet of paper.
Make it easier, make it harder
Easier: do the whole thing yourself once while your child watches and talks, then let them repeat it. Watching first is not cheating; it is how children learn almost everything. Harder: change one thing and only one thing — double the amount, use cold water instead of warm, use a bigger or smaller container — and ask whether the result changed. Keeping everything else the same is the idea at the heart of every experiment, and a five-year-old can understand it perfectly if you say it in those words.
After you finish
Ask your child to tell someone else what happened — a grandparent on the phone counts. Explaining something out loud is the single best way to fix it in memory, and it turns an activity into a story they own. This experiment belongs to the "Colours and shapes" 🎨 week in Golu's Day, so it fits neatly beside that week's songs, books and games.
More experiments to try
There are 56 activities on the things to do at home page: 32 kitchen science experiments and 24 crafts, all free, all with steps read aloud in 34 languages. If you would rather have something on paper, the free printables page has tracing sheets, colouring pages and flashcards to print.