Erupt a Volcano!!!

One of my favorite activities when I taught was during an earth unit. We would discuss volcanoes and make our own. The kids loved this simple to do and easy to set-up activity.

My son had a friend over yesterday and I try to do one fun thing when he has a friend over. Yesterday we read the book below about volcanoes, watched a real volcano explode via you tube, then made our own volcanoes, and finally drew a volcano exploding... As my son put it; "thanks mom, this was so much fun!"

Here is a video of the volcano we made in action:

How did we do it???
First we made a volcano...

We used a pie tin (they come in 3's at the dollar store).

We put a baby food jar in the center.

We then covered the baby food jar with red fusion clay. We made it stick to the pie plate by making sure we presses the bottom part of the fusion clay to the plate.


After the Volcano was made.
We put two tablespoons of basking soda in our jar.
We added two tablespoons of water.
For colorful lava we added a drop of purple food coloring.
We used a baby spoon to mix the three things up. (This is fun for the kids... tell them they need to mix it at least a 100's. They don't really need to mix it much, but they have so much fun doing it you might as well keep them busy.)




To Make It Erupt
You need about 2 tablespoons of vinegar. I put them in a small cup so the kiddos can dump them all at once. You can repeat until the volcano is done erupting... So much fun.

With this recipe you can wash out the volcano and do it all over again. We did it yesterday and today.

Classroom Management Tips:
-Measure out the baking soda & water into Dixie cups. Have each child come up to get a Dixie cup mixture, mixing spoon, and their choice of color. Have them mix in the cup and then pour into the volcano.

-Pass out pre-measured vinegar in Dixie cups.

- Have the kiddos draw what happened

Resources

My kids loved this YOUTUBE video!!!