Nurture Learning

This year, the 31st October fell on a Friday – the day for our science classes. How could I let the opportunity go by?

We made slime. This connected with our work earlier on in the year about polymers.

My son led an activity making strange noises with plastic cups and string (courtesy of Science Bob). Although we didn’t go into the science, this did connect a little with our work this term on Sound.

We also offered Science Bob’s dancing ghosts activity, using tissue paper, balloons and electrostatics. This wasn’t so popular, probably because it was harder to make the ghosts ‘dance’ and also because we didn’t have anyone officially in charge of the activity.

We ate fairly healthy Halloween food.

My ‘shrunken heads‘ burnt a little in the oven, but I’m still going to make them again as they were pretty impressive nevertheless. Our ‘mummy dogs‘ (made with pork sausages, not frankfurters) were so popular they are absent from the above photo as they had all been eaten already. One mum brought some raspberry cordial and sparkling mineral water for us to make ‘fizzy blood’ drinks. My children really enjoyed these!

All the children and most of the parents dressed up. I should have taken a photo of everyone. It makes me very happy to be part of this wonderful homeschooling community.

I didn’t do the pumpkin ‘elephant’s toothpaste’ activity, but then I only had 3% hydrogen peroxide so it might be better to wait until I can source some 6%. I really want to do this demo sometime.

(Steve Spangler uses potassium iodide as his catalyst above, and I suspect he has a higher concentration of hydrogen peroxide too. I was going to use the more kid-friendly yeast-catalysed version, from Dr How’s Science Wows.)

Next year, I would love to buy a UV lamp (sometimes known as a ‘black’ light), do some glow-in-the-dark science (more ideas from Science Wows) and make drinks with glowing ice cubes (another idea from Science Bob).

Happy Halloween, everyone!

(Ghost hands idea from Crafts by Amanda.)