We’ve made normal lava lamps and spooky lava lamps and now pumpkin lava lamps. These are super easy to make and great fun to watch, especially in the dark.
Other ideas are to try different colours, add glitter, or get creative and make them look like a witch or ghost.
How to make a pumpkin lava lamp
You will need
- A clear plastic bottle or jar
- A bottle of vegetable oil
- Orange food colouring
- Glitter
- Water
- Alka Seltzer
- Black pen and pipe cleaners for decoration
Lava Lamp Instructions
Fill the bottle or jar a quarter full with water, add some orange food colouring and mix well.
Top up to the (near) top with the vegetable oil.
They should separate into two layers, water at the bottom and oil sitting on top.
Decorate as you wish, we used a black white board pen for the face.
Pop in half an alka seltzer tablet and watch what happens.
How do lava lamps work?
Firstly water and oil will not mix – this is because we say that water is a polar molecule, it’s structure means that is has a positive charge one end and a negative charge the other. Water molecules stick together because the positive end of one water molecule is attracted to the negative end of another while oil molecule structure is different – it is non polar meaning that its charge is more evenly spread out, so the oil is not attracted to water, we call it hydrophobic (water fearing) so it tries to get as far away from water as possible and will not mix. The reason that oil rests on top of the water rather than underneath is because it has a different density to water.
As the alka seltzer is added (this is made of citric acid and sodium bicarbonate) it reacts with the water and form carbon dioxide gas and Sodium citrate. It is the bubbles of carbon dioxide that carry the coloured water to the top giving a lava lamp effect.
More Halloween Science Experiments
Try one of these great Halloween Science Experiments including jumping ghosts, a spooky noise maker and fake blood.
Or how about giving one of our spooky Halloween STEM challenges a go?
Amanda
October 19, 2014 at 3:02 pmThey are so cool I love them. We’ve been decorating pumpkins too.
susanna
October 19, 2014 at 5:08 pmVery cool (and original)! I think we may try it at half term. x
Aly
October 22, 2014 at 7:28 amI have loads of jars the girls can use to make these.This will be great for a half term activity next week.