Reading a story about Electricity

We are reading a neat book about electricity that starts with the time in the beginning and explains how people realized that there was some electrical force in all things.  It had us run a comb through our hair and then use the comb to pick up pieces of paper. It didn't work when I ran the comb through Megan's hair the first time, but did through the end of my hair (in was in a braid). It was then able to pick up the small pieces of paper. Then, Megan's hair worked too. Then, we tried to pick up other things, like a small screw, a small piece of wood chip from the lizard's house, etc, but Megan assumed they were too heavy. We could not get anything else to be picked up.  The we discussed that everything is made up of atoms, the parts of an atom and the inner parts of an atom (the neutron and the proton) are very rarely lost by an atom as they are held tightly in the atom's center, and that like charges repel and unlike charges attract. The book explained that if an atom has too little or too many of negative charges, they will be unstable and react.