Halloween
Science
Holidays provide a great way to spark interest in
science. You can look at the various features of the
holiday and then try to link these to science concepts,
skills, techniques or ideas. In this page we will use
Halloween as an example.
- Jot down a list of
all the things that come to mind when you think of
Halloween. Here are a few examples: spiders
and cobwebs, bats, vampires, pumpkins, jack o lanterns,
witches on brooms, the color orange, costumes, ghosts.
You can also do some research on the history of
Halloween to come up with ideas.
- The next step would be to try and come up with science activities related to the different Halloween ideas. for example, why are pumpkins orange?
- Do some research on pumpkins.
- This could lead to many different activities, e.g. use chromatography to isolate the orange pigments from pumpkin flesh
- Now do some searching for activities related to Halloween and the various ideas you came up with. Here are a few examples:
- Biology
- Paper chromatography to separate plant pigments
- THE DEMISE OF A HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN
- Biology in science fiction - Scary stories for Halloween
- Chemistry
- Pumpkin Chemistry - Halloween Special
- Spooky Halloween chemistry
- Halloween Chemistry
- Halloween
Chemistry
projects
- Physics
- Halloween physics
- Haunted Laboratory: Halloween Physics Part II
- Halloween Costumes Improved by Physics
- Halloween party physics
- How to Use Physics for Apple Bobbing on Halloween
- Earth Science
- Science
- All
The
Science Articles You Need For Halloween
- http://www.nclark.net/Holidays#Halloween
- Halloween Physics: Haunted Science lab
- Hands-on Halloween Science
- Halloween Science Experiments & Ideas!
- http://scienceblogs.com/digitalbio/holidays/halloween/
- http://sciencecafe.org/content/2008/12/21/halloween-stuff/
- Tonight's spooky pre-Halloween activity:
- Turn out the lights and use a Jack-o-Lantern image (Creative Commons licensed images from flickr.com) as your sole source of light
- You could have inserted
your jack o lantern image on a blog post or web page and
then have a student come up to the smartboard and
"click" on the jack o lantern to bring up the Halloween
sound effects such as creaking doors, etc.:
- This photo is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/halloweenstock/with/5122312692/