Tag - halloween science demonstrations

A Twist on an Old Favorite – Screaming Ghost Balloons

We love to see a twist or a new idea for one of our experiments and activities. One of our favorite bloggers Janelle at Brimful Curiousities, shared this idea on her blog. We loved it so much, we want to share it with our readers…

Janelle took our Screaming Balloon activity one step further and made ghosts with the balloons. First, she added the hex nut to the balloon and blew it up, just as the experiment explains. Then, she took white kitchen garbage bags and placed the balloons inside. She taped up the bag at the bottom of the balloon to keep the balloon from falling out of the bottom. Finally, she and her kids used black permanent pens to draw faces on the ghosts.

The ghosts can also glow by turning off the lights and placing a flashlight behind them.

The ghosts were named and played with for an entire evening. I’m sure her house was filled with whirring sounds and laughter. A science lesson about centripetal force also sneaked in.

An added bonus for using the garbage bags is if and when the balloon pops, the hex nut is
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Mad About Science Week – Wally Keesecker

Our week-long salute to amazing science teachers wraps up with a visit to Heritage High School in Littleton, Colorado, where chemistry teacher Wally Keesecker gets students fired up about science. Wally is well-known for his attention-grabbing science demos that introduce students to real-world connections to everyday chemistry.

Video: The Steve Spangler Mad Scientist Tour finishes the week with a bang at Heritage High School. 6 a.m. October 7, 2005.
This is an especially fun visit for Steve since Wally Keesecker was his 8th grade science teacher in the Littleton Public Schools. “People like me make the decision to go into education after being inspired by an amazing teacher. While I didn’t exactly know that I would one day become a science teacher, I knew that I wanted to do something in education after experiencing someone as amazing as Wally Keesecker,” says Steve Spangler who is like a kid in a candy store whenever he pays a visit to his former science teacher.

Wally and his teaching colleagues dazzled us with two demonstrations centered around a Halloween theme. The first demo illustrated a chemical reaction that oozed from the eyes and mouth of a carved pumpkin. Because
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