I have been searching for practical science equipment for children and found the Steve Spangler Science Website. I decided to order the jelly marbles kit, tornado tube, buzz magnets, and test tubes.
The reason for the jelly marbles kit is that it comes with pipettes, mini-mixing tray, petri dish, color tablets, cups, measuring scoop, polymer spheres, and 9 experiments. We had been at our friends house, who is a science teacher, and she listed most of these items as great to have for a home science kit. The polymer spheres are especially fun to grow and shrink again.
Steve Spangler did a quick job of processing my order and delivering the products. They even included a cool experiment called the “mentos geyser” which is a test tube of mentos to dump into a 2 liter of soda creating a 20 ft geyser of soda. Our children can’t wait for the weather to warm so we can go outside and create our own geyser.
The test tubes are very durable and have screw on lids so the children can carry their experiments around with them. We put a few jelly marbles, food coloring, and water into a tube and took it on errands with us. It was a blast for the children to see how the marbles grew throughout the afternoon. The only negative was once the jelly marbles grew, they got stuck in the test tube as the top is narrower than the bottom. For most experiments I don’t think this will be a problem and the marbles were easy to break and dump out.
Stay tuned for the fun and simple experiments we created with our Steve Spangler materials.
