Ghost Balloons (and free printable)

This week, while browsing Facebook, I saw the coolest little craft project---simple, inexpensive, difficult to mess up, and sure to delight! A librarian friend of mine did this activity with a student group and it was a hit (shout out to all of the children's/youth librarians!), so I stole it. It would be great to use with AAC users (or actually for a variety of speech goals)---or just with your own children at home.

Here's what you need:

• .5 cup vinegar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• balloon
• water bottle 
• optional: index card (helpful for getting the baking soda into the balloon)
• optional: funnel (helpful for getting the vinegar into the water bottle)
• optional: sharpie (for drawing a ghost face, if you'd like)

Here's what you do:

• (Note: Before beginning, I blew up our balloons to stretch them a bit.)
• Draw a face on the balloon (if you'd like). The face will fade a bit as it stretches.
• Measure and pour half a cup of vinegar into an empty water bottle.
• Measure and pour a teaspoon of baking soda into your balloon. Tip: if you roll an index card into a funnel shape and insert the tip into the balloon opening, it's pretty easy to do get the baking soda inside. (Other techniques were not as successful.)
• Carefully stretch the mouth of the balloon over the top of the water bottle---taking care to let the balloon flop to the side so that no baking soda escapes.
• Lift the balloon, dropping the baking soda into the vinegar. The resulting reaction causes a sudden burst of bubbles and inflates the balloon!

I made a quick book to go with this activity. The photos show a pretty clear sequence of steps, although you may want to customize the pages (e.g., take out the index card page if you're not using it) and/or the text. For the sample book, I used simple sentences and repeated some core words (e.g., need, get, put, it, in, look) . . . but this activity could be easily used to target a number of goals and a wide range of vocabulary. The book has been uploaded as a (free) powerpoint file, so you can easily modify the text on each page, or add/delete pages. 

Here are the screenshots from "Ghost Balloons!"

 

The link to download the powerpoint file for this book is here: Ghost Balloons!  (I'm not sure why the file is so big--it says unable to preview because it's so large---which is why I uploaded the whole sample book here. It can still be downloaded from that link, just not previewed.)

If you end up using it, or doing this activity, swing by here or our Facebook page and let me know how it goes!