Sharing God's Love: Walking Water Rainbow Experiment

The rainbow is a great symbol for Christians of God's love and promise to us.  It's also the symbol of new beginnings- a key message of Christianity.  This activity helps children to think about their own ability to share God's love with others and to pray for those who don't yet know that love.  Plus it's pretty amazing to watch over time!

You will need: 6 clear cups, water, food colouring in red, yellow and blue, 6 sheets of absorbent kitchen roll

Fill 3 of the cups half full with coloured water and arrange with the three unfilled cups like so:

Fold the kitchen roll in half lengthways and then double it over again.

Place the end of each piece of kitchen roll in one of the cups of water and the other end in an empty cup, so that it looks like this:

Wait!

The water will start to climb the paper and pass into the empty cup where it will mix with the water from the next cup but one, which will also be transferring over...

Your empty cups will now be filled with coloured water- purple (from the blue and red cups), green (from the yellow and blue cups) and orange (from the yellow and red cups)

You will have made a rainbow!

Talk about the story of the rainbow appearing after the flood, God's love and promise and the new beginning it signalled.

In the water experiment, the paper helped the water to travel from one cup to another.  We can be a bit like the paper, by helping to spread the message about God's love and promise to other people, who might not have heard about it.  How might we do that? How do people show love to you? How do you show love to others? How would you let others know about God's love? What might you do or say?

Pray: ask children to think about people they know who don't know that God loves them.  Set up the experiment again and get them to write the names of these people on an empty cup.  Ask children to write their own names on one of the coloured cups.  As the water starts to 'walk' between the cups, pray that God will help them to find ways of showing God's love to the people they have chosen.