Party Fountain
Anitha Bennett
Bored of the same old party decorations? How about making something magical and different for your next birthday table? All you need are a couple of ingredients from the kitchen.
Things needed
An opaque dish
A plastic glass
Tray or large plate
1/4 cup vinegar
4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup dishwashing liquid
Food colour (depending on the theme of your party)
Glitter
Confetti
Execution
1. Decorate the opaque dish with a colourful gift-wrap or shiny foil around the dish.
2. Place the dish on a tray.
3. Serve three to four spoons of baking soda into the dish.
4. In the plastic glass, mix half cup of water, quarter cup, of dishwash liquid and a quarter cup of vinegar together with some food colouring, confetti and glitter. This is the magic birthday potion! The birthday child gets to hold the tumbler.
5. When all are ready and waiting around the table, cut the cake and empty the magic potion into the decorated dish.
Stand back and watch! A chemical reaction will occur. The baking soda will react with vinegar to produce carbon dioxide gas. The gas will push a glittering foamy liquid out of the top of the dish.
Enjoy the birthday party fountain!
Day for others
Life without the electric bulb? We cannot imagine it! Thanks to Thomas Alva Edison, who discovered electricity, we are able to flip a switch to light up a room. But it wasn’t a cakewalk for Edison. When he was a little boy, Edison had a hearing problem, which eventually led to learning problems in school. His teacher asked Edison not to come back to school and sent his parents a note that said, “Your child is too dumb to attend school.”
Thomas’s mother wrote back saying that if the school could not, she would tutor him herself. And there began a process in which his mother exposed Thomas to books and ideas way beyond his age. This encouraged him to start his own laboratory in his basement at age 11 to try out all types of experiments.
Thomas’ inquisitive mind and voracious reading spurred him on, and in 1882, when he was just 35 years old, he invented the electric filament.
In his lifetime Thomas Edison registered more than 1,000-patented inventions in his name!