Volcano Thursday

Today Elizabeth and I set off to learn about volcanos. She recently saw Alvin and the Chipmunks - Chipwrecked - and in the movie they have to flee an erupting volcano. She's been talking about it non-stop so I thought that we would learn about them a bit more. Since it's rainy today and we're stuck at home it made today the perfect day to play.

First we did an experiment with water, oil and salt.

We poured water into glasses and then added food coloring to make them pretty. We had some fun mixing the food coloring to make green and other colors.

Then I put in a dollop of cooking oil. We talked about how oil and water don't mix and waited for the oil to seperate and come to the top.  Next I poured kosher salt into a bowl and gave E a spoon. Her job was to add heaping spoons of salt to each glass. The salt grabs the oil and makes it sink to the bottom of the glass. Then as the salt melts the oil is released in bubbles that come back to the surface. It was supposed to illustrate how lava flows from the bottom of a volcano but it ended up just showing her how a lava lamp works.

The great part was that she wanted to keep adding salt so these sat on our table for the morning and she would run over and add salt and play with them for a few minutes and then go away and come back again later to add more salt. Provided a lot of fun once I got over being nervous she was going to tip over the glasses. All I could imagine was having to clean all that cooking oil off my table and floor - yuck!

After that we used Crayola "clay" to make volcanos.

We had some clay left over from our Kiwi Crate so we used that - it's a weird foam like clay that doesn't really stick to anything or make a mess so I love it ;) Elizabeth made a yellow volcano with pink balls for decoration because it had to be a pretty mountain.

Once they had dried a bit we took them outside and put baking soda inside of them.

She then poured vinegar into them to see them 'erupt' In her words "Wow, cool" We had fun seeing them erupt and we learned a bit about mixing vinegar and baking soda, but really we just had fun making a mess!

After the volcanos had erupted numerous times and I was out of vinegar she sat and played with the mess left on the cookie sheet for a good 20 minutes. She said it felt like 'angels' because the baking soda was soft and foamy.

All in all, a great rainy day activity!