Candy Science Experiments for Your Halloween Leftovers

Odds are good if you celebrate Halloween that your household is about to have more candy in it than you really want to or should eat. So why not turn some of that sugary goodness into a science project?

Check out this article on the best STEM gifts for kids.

Check out our Online store for special buys on Educational gifts We find bulk items and end-of-stock supplies to bring you heavily discounted items. (make sure you check our store often so you don’t miss out on new stock). We also have some free printable files, including a Science PDF for learning about Microscopes.

Playdough to Plato has collected 21 candy science experiments you and your kids can do with cast off Skittles, gummies, M&Ms and more.

A couple of my favorites are

Skittles Rainbow in a Jar

Candy Chromotography

Does Candy Sink or Float? (We did a similar thing at our local children’s museum and my daughter really enjoyed it)

Pop Rockets don’t actually use candy (plastic candy containers are used to build the rockets) but they’re really cool so I couldn’t help including them)

There’s lots of other great stuff over there, too, so go check it out for some fun activities to continue the Halloween festivities without actually eating all the candy the kids collected!

Do you do science with candy? I’d love to hear what you’ve tried.

[Photo via Playdough to Plato.]

Next Plan Idea:

Learning about Women in STEM

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Next Plan Idea:

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