6 November 2017
Every year in their lessons before 5 November, we do fun practicals, flame-testing some of the metal salt chemicals that go into fireworks. You get different reds from calcium, strontium and lithium; greens from copper, purples from potassium and orange from sodium. Claire also demonstrated the fizz you get from iron filings, the white you get from magnesium and the 'dragon's breath' (where you spray a salt solution over the flame). On our fireworks night, you could hear some of the boys in the crowd shouting which metals they were seeing in the display!
