Our Halloween lava lamp experiment is perfect for young mad scientists exploring chemistry and physics! We love science, and we love Halloween, so we have tons of fun Halloween science experiments to share with you.
Spooky Halloween Lava Lamp Experiment
This is a fantastic twist on our classic homemade lava lamp experiment; read more about it here.
Supplies:
- Jar or beaker
- Cooking oil
- Water
- Food coloring
- Alka seltzer tablets or generic equivalent
- Spooky Halloween accessories (We used some spooky spiders from the dollar store!)
Lava Lamp Experiment Set Up
Lava Lamp Tip: To minimize the mess, set up this experiment on a plastic tray or dollar store cookie sheet.
STEP 1: Fill a jar 3/4 of the way with oil.
STEP 2: Now, fill the rest of the jar with water.
Observe what happens to the oil and water in your jar as you add them.
These steps above are great for helping your kids practice their fine motor skills and learn about approximate measurements. We eyeballed our liquids, but you can measure out your liquids.
STEP 3: Observe what happens when you add drops of food coloring to the oil and water mixture. We went with dark food coloring for our Halloween theme.
STEP 4: Now add an Alka Seltzer tablet and see what happens. Repeat as desired with another tablet.
Watch out. This can also get messy, especially if the kids sneak in extra tablets.
Did you know that oil and water don’t mix because they don’t have the same density? Read on to find out more.
The Science Of A Halloween Lava Lamp
In this experiment, we explore both physics and chemistry! Liquids, like oil and water, have different viscosities and densities, meaning they don’t mix and separate naturally. Water is denser than oil, so it sinks to the bottom. When you add a tablet, it reacts with the water, producing carbon dioxide bubbles that lift the colored water through the oil, creating a spooky lava lamp effect. Read more about lava lamps [here].
💡 Check out what happens with a combination of liquids when you try our spooky liquid density tower!
More Creepy Science To Try
- Monster Slime
- Fluffy Zombie Slime
- Dissolving Candy Corn
- Halloween Lava Lamp
- Frankenstein’s Frozen Brain
- Gelatin Heart Experiment
Printable Halloween STEM Activities Pack
150+ Pages of Halloween-Themed Materials!
This Halloween project pack is suitable for home, school, and group use for kids in grades Kindergarten through elementary but is scaleable for many ages and abilities.
What’s Included:
- 25+ Halloween theme science and STEM activities with printable sheets, instructions, and useful information all using easy-to-source materials perfect for limited-time needs. Includes a Halloween engineering pack with fun, problem-based challenges for kids to solve!
- The skeleton activity pack includes building a skeleton challenge and a coding challenge! Try a skeleton bones bridge-building STEM challenge!
- Halloween theme brick printable activities for hands-on learning with math that is perfect for early finishers or home fun and reinforces basic math concepts.
- Bonus fun pack includes games and activities to round out your Halloween theme activities such as I Spy, bingo, matching, Would You Rather cards, scavenger hunt, word search, A-Z Halloween hunt, and a coloring page.
- Halloween STEAM Pack includes artist-inspired projects by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and more!
