📄 Which paper pulls water up the highest?

My hypothesis

If I change the kind of paper, then how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes will ______, because ______.

🔊 You fill in the blanks. Think about how tightly packed each paper looks up close, and whether any of them is coated. A guess is a good because: the test finds out.

Change, measure, keep the same

Scientists call the thing you change the independent variable and the thing you measure the dependent variable. The things you keep the same are the controls: if one of them changed too, you wouldn't know which change made the difference. Try each of the 4 levels 3 times.

What you need

• 🧻 Paper towels: 1 sheet
• ⚪ Round paper coffee filters: 3
• 📄 Paper: a sheet of printer paper
• 🧻 Tissue paper: 3 sheets
• 🌈 Food colouring: one dark colour
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🫙 A clear jar or tall glass: a wide glass
• ✏️ A pencil
• ⏱️ A stopwatch or a kitchen timer
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 📏 A ruler
• 🩹 Tape

Steps

1. Pour water into a wide glass and stir in lots of food colouring.🔊
2. Cut twelve strips, 1 cm wide and 12 cm long: three from each kind of paper.🔊
3. Write the kind of paper at the top of each strip in pencil.🔊
4. Tape the tops of four strips, one of each kind, to a pencil with gaps between them.🔊
5. Lay the pencil across the glass and add water until the bottom 1 cm of each strip dips in.🔊
6. Start the timer. After ten minutes, lift the pencil out and lay the strips flat.🔊
7. Measure from the bottom of each strip up to where the colour stops, and write it in your table.🔊
8. Do it two more times with new strips.🔊
9. Find the mean for each paper, and draw a bar graph.🔊

Every step is one you can do yourself, with a grown-up nearby. Write each number down straight away, in the table below, so nothing is lost.

Your results table

From 4th grade, add the tries for each level and divide by how many there were: that's the mean, and it goes in the last column. Then draw a bar graph, one bar for each thing you tried.

Why it works

🔊 Paper is made of tiny fibres with gaps between them. Water clings to the fibres and climbs through the gaps, which is called capillary action. How high it gets depends on the size of the gaps, and on whether the paper has a coating to keep water out.

Going further (7th and up): Change a second thing: use cold water and warm tap water, and graph the climb for each paper at both temperatures.

Board layout

This project at your grade

From 4th grade up, the table gets a mean column. See every project for 2nd grade, or print a blank results table.

What a judge will ask

• What did you change, and what did you measure? I changed the kind of paper and measured how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes, in cm.
• What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? I kept strips of the same width and length and the bottom 1 cm of every strip in the water the same, so the only difference was the kind of paper.
• How many times did you test it? 3 times at each of my 4 levels.
• If you did it again, what would you change or test next? I'd use cold water and warm tap water, and graph the climb for each paper at both temperatures.

Make it yours

Keep this project on this device and Peabody counts down to your fair day, with a plan for each day. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Try next

• 🌈 Does a wider paper strip walk water faster?2nd–6th grade · 1 day of testing · free🧪 Water, ice and mixing · 🧂 Kitchen things
• 🧻 Which paper towel soaks up the most water?1st–5th grade · 1 day of testing · free🧪 Water, ice and mixing · 🧂 Kitchen things