This party was pretty over the top. I think my husband started planning it back in March! His birthday is one day before my son's so this party was also for him. :)
My youngest son turned 8. We had 7 party attendees. Almost all were friends from school and one boy is a friend from church.
We didn't do anything fancy for the invitation - I just sent an Evite. For decorations, I went to the local teachers store and I got a poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements
and a poster about the parts of a cell. I also found a bulletin board set of science items which I put around our deck railing.
My husband assumed the identity of "Professor Molecule" and he adopted a German accent. Think Dr. Doofenshmirtz from Phinneas and Ferb, if you know the show. He used tons of super hair gel to make his hair crazy.
He gave a safety talk to the kids first.
We're fortunate that my husband works at a company with a lab so he borrowed some lab coats and safety glasses. We didn't have quite enough lab coats so we used some mens white dress shirts which worked just fine. I had an off white jacket which I wore. I mainly ran around taking photo and video and doing clean up.
The kids were eager to wear the lab coats and glasses.
Here's a list of the science experiments we did. Most of the ideas came from
Steve Spangler's website.
The boys did the experiments in teams of two. We were so thankful that we had good weather for the party so everything was done outside.
1. Bacteria.
We have a friend who works as a biologist so she was able to give up a whole bunch of petri dishes with AGAR for growing bacteria.
We swabbed the following places to grow bacteria:
- top of the garbage bin
- the inside of the birthday boy's mouth
- the inside door handle of the bathroom
- cloth from the kitchen sink
We started growing the bacteria several weeks before the party date. We set the petri dishes in a warm place to better grow bacteria.
2. Fire Extinguisher
Using sodium bicarbonate and vinegar to produce carbon dioxide that extinguishes
a flame, first a tea light candle and then a cotton ball soaked in lighter fluid sitting
on top of the inverted tea light to stay dry.
We borrowed the beakers and pipettes from the lab at my husband's workplace.
3. Make your own green slime.
Here's the recipe if you'd like to make it yourself.
Ingredients:
- 8 oz. bottle of school glue (Glue All works even better)
- Borax powder
- green food colouring
Directions:
Empty the entire bottle of glue into a mixing bowl. Fill the empty bottle with warm water and shake . Pour the glue-water mixture into the mixing bowl and use the spoon to mix well.
Add a few drops of food coloring. ****see my note after the next photo.
Measure 1/2 cup of warm water into the plastic cup and add a teaspoon of Borax powder to the water. Stir the solution – don’t worry if all of the powder dissolves.
While stirring the glue in the mixing bowl, slowly add a little of the Borax solution. Use your hands to do the serious mixing. Keep adding the Borax solution to the glue mixture (don’t stop mixing) until you get a perfect batch of slime.
Note: some kids used WAY too much food colouring so if you let the kids do this, maybe give them only a small quantity. We let them use the bottle of food colouring. Oops.
We had a break after this one for the kids to wash their hands and have snacks and drinks. I served blue and red gatorade for drinks and chips and pretzels were the snacks. The party was in the late afternoon so we didn't need to serve a lot of food.
4. Elephant toothpaste
- part 1 using 3 % peroxide - this is what you find at the drug store
- part 2 using 20% peroxide - can be purchased from a beauty supply store
- part 3 using 30 % peroxide - has to be obtained from a chemistry lab
One piece of advice for you, if you try a science experiment party, allow time to clean up your demo surface in between experiments. I'd recommend using a metal or plastic table without a tablecloth so you can quickly wipe it off between experiments.
5. Alka Seltzer Rockets
Simple ingredients: packets of alka-seltzer and film canisters. The tricky part is finding film canisters. I'm told you can get these free from Costco. We got alternative canisters from
Tap Plastics and cut the hinges off.
Instructions:
Fill canister 3/4 full with water. Put half tablet (1/4 works fine) into canister and close the lid, then turn upside down
on a table. Wait for about 10 seconds. They went about 10 meters in the air. We did each kid in turn, but should have had them all follow along and do them at
once. They weren't good at doing it themselves because once the alka seltzer went
in they got nervous and chickened out from putting the lid on. Eventually we had
to stop them and move on.
No photos of this, only video. The boys loved these!
6. Smoke Bomb Demo
The elements were potassium nitrate and powdered sugar. Stump remover contains potassium nitrate. This was done in a tin can and lit with a BBQ lighter, far, far away from the kids.
Again, no photos, only video for this one. I needed a photographer assistant!!
We had birthday cake next. We ordered the cake from Safeway. We had them keep it simple and just write Happy Birthday on the border. My husband drew with icing some beakers and an atom, in the centre of the cake.
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| Name blurred out for privacy! |
The birthday boy opened his presents next. As he opened them, I asked the boy who gave him the gift stand next to him so I could get a photo with him and the guest. Lots of Nerf guns and Lego.
We did one last demo which was a Diet Coke and Mentos geyser. I took video of this, but no photos.
At this point some neighbour boys came over armed with water guns and a big battle ensued.
The goodie bags I handed out contained:
- a kit to make your own fake snow (from dollar store)
- goofy glasses with mustaches (from party supply section at Target)
- a test tube filled with Nerds candy. I found the test tubes at the teacher store. 12 for 10 dollars.
- some green slime in a baggie
- the materials needed to grow your own bacteria at home (a petri dish and AGFAR).
I printed out this image
and glued it to the front of plain white paper bags which I labelled with the guests' names.
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