Se7en Steps to a Science Party…

We have a technology mad hood and a mysterious magician hood and due to a whole pile of circumstances we missed their birthday party celebrations this past year and every time we got ready and organized something intervened and finally last week we managed to put together a shared party… and the only possible party theme I could think of was a scientific party with lots of scientific challenges for the techno guy and a multitude mysterious concoctions for the magician.

So here we go in Se7en Steps…

Step 1: Invitation: You can either make a very clever experiment sheet: with hypothesis, experiment, equipment needed, result and conclusion. Or you can run out of time – hehe – and print a postcard size image of some famous scientists and pop your party details on the back of it.

Step 2: Party Starter: A great scientific party starter would be to equip your scientists with a scientific notebook, from the PocketMod. Choose a notebook that has a couple of pages selected from the reference section: formulas or a conversion charts – whatever, as long as they have their Scientific Notebook they are good to rock and roll.

Step 3: Party Craft: The crafts for this party were quickly relabeled as scientific challenges. And there are a heap of great places to find quick and easy science experiments for kids on the web, our favorite one is the Naked Scientist. Don’t be put off by the name (!), they are genuine scientists from Cambridge University. For the scientifically minded of you I have included a link with each challenge and you can follow the link to find out how the experiment works and more about it.

• Scientific Challenge #1: Who can build the most fabulous tower from toothpicks and gum drops? First I gave a demonstration trying to make a tetrahedron salt crystal and then left them to it.
  

  

• Scientific Challenge #2: Can you pierce a balloon with a skewer?

  

• Scientific Challenge #3: Can you pick up a soda bottle with a straw?

  

  
  

• Scientific Challenge #4: Can you create something you would find under a microscope, given some quick dry craft clay, googley eyes and pipe cleaners? There was a lot of vomit – aaahhh boys! and a couple of googley eyed bugs!
  

  

• Scientific Challenge #5: Can you pick up a potato with a straw?

  

  

  Step 4: Party Games:

  • Concoction 1: Can you make Ice-cream in a ziplock bag? There was quite a bit of awed disbelief here and then they thought it would be, well not as good as the real thing. Of course you can – if you know how, and its just as good! (Please follow our link – Ice-cream in a bag in Se7en Steps). This is really impressive and you will have a lot of very ambitious “scientists” with big ideas about there own personal ice-ceam supply for the rest of time!

    How does it work? The ice and salt melt at a temperature lower than 0 degrees Celsius, so they draw their heat from your hands and the ice-cream. As more heat is drawn from your ice-cream mixture it gets cold enough to freeze. For a full scientific explanation read down at the bottom of this link.

    

  • Concotion 2: Can you make giant side-walk chalks in a bucket? Here’s our link to making Giant Sidewalk Chalks in Se7en Steps. This is super messy project, well it needn’t be if you have very neat and tidy scientists, no – this is really a super messy project.

    

    

    
    

  Step 5: Party Food: Remember for a good party you need one food and one beverage.

  Carrying on with the theme of concoctions our food was a mini-fondue: This is very easy to put together: I made three dips and three things to dip: apple, bananas and mini-marshmallows. We used stick pretzels as our dipping sticks. I also put a bowl of sprinkles out (100’s and 1000’s) to smother our dipped goodies.

  • Dip one: Melt a slab of white chocolate.
  • Dip two: Melt a slab of the best dark chocolate you can find and once melted stir through a good dollop of cream. (At this stage you might want to retreat to your own private corner – but no the party must go on!).
  • Dip three: For a caramel sauce: Melt equal weights of castor sugar and butter in a small pot on a low heat – stirring all the time. Once it has melted add an equal amount of cream to your sauce and keep stirring until boiling point. Let it cool and it is good to go.
  

  

  

  And our beverage was self-made soda floats, a lump of ice-cream dropped into a glass of soda – no science party would be complete without a certain amount of fizzing and whizzing.

  

  Not forgetting the all important cakes: What do you get when you look through a telescope: dark blue sky and a galaxy of stars and planets. How easy is that!

  

  

  And for the gadget boy: an i-pod, just a block of ice-cream, cut a circle and a square out of paper – for controls, sprinkled 100 and 1000’s on top and you have ann i-pod… in retrospect I could have given it a color, but hay you get white i-pods!

  

  

  Step 6: Party Pinata: We just mad a mysterious magical egg and filled it with: streamers, candy, sparklers and tiny bubble balloon makers that I had lying around (Don’t all mothers have that sort of thing lying around?).

  
  

  

  Step 7: Treasure Hunt: At this stage the guys are pretty worn out – believe me and a simple seek and discover treasure hunt is the order of the day. Print out these cute science fact cards, pop a set in an envelope for each kid and set them off hunting… fast, fun and something to take home. The older the kids are the harder you make the hunt… have no fear about difficulty they have enough energy from their soda floats to run a small planet… this is the time to officially exhaust them.

  

  

  That’s It – Send them home. Oh hang on most of them live here!