it's electrifyin'

This is all the result of yet another rabbit trail :-)

The other day, Alex became obsessed with the idea that he wanted to build a working hot air balloon with Legos and other materials. Well... since we wouldn't let him use actual fire to make the hot air (mean parents aren't we?) he had to come up with other alternatives to make his balloon float. He was making us a little mental so I ended up pulling a stack of science experiment books off the shelf and told him that perhaps he might find something in them. My hope was that he would find an alternative or he would become distracted by other experiments. He was distracted by other experiments... because about an hour later, he brought me one of the books with half the pages dog eared (wasn't totally thrilled that he did that... but oh well).

Here's one of the first ones he worked on... the static charge detector...

It's hard to see since our glass isn't smooth, but the pieces of foil repelled each other when something with a static charge was place by the nail at the top of the glass. They have kept the detector in tact and periodically check different things throughout the day.

The experiment came from here...

101 Great Science Experiments