Volcano!

  
As you may know, we home school our kids.  Our oldest is only 5 so we are doing Kindergarten with her and preschool with our 3 year old.  We've been going through the regular lessons and things suggested in What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know and What Your Preschooler Needs to Know, as well as doing a few worksheets, but this week I thought we'd do something a little more fun that most Kindergarteners and Preschoolers don't get to do.  We learned about volcanoes!  Not only that, we made one!  First we checked out a few books from the library about volcanoes, watched some educational videos on youtube, and then made and made errupt our volcano!

Here is the final product.  Painted and with people and trees and houses and rocks made of modeling clay.

Here is a shot of one of the volcanoes "erupting."  We did the regular baking soda and vinegar, I just added some food coloring to it so we could have red or orange "lava."  During this project I used some of my husband's worn out work shirts for the kids to wear over their clothes so they wouldn't get messy, and put some old sheets on the table to protect it.

I had a hard time getting a picture when the lava looked just right, here my timing was right but there's a little kid arm in the way!  That's how it goes I guess!

In case you were curious:
to make the volcano I used an old milk carton cut in half with the halves upside down.  I duck taped some empty yogurt cups on top of that, then made the basic volcano shape with aluminum foil.  My 5 year old held with the tape, ripping the foil, and smoothing it out.  Then my five year old and I covered it with paper mache, using a mix of two parts water with one part glue, and strips of newspaper, while my three year old played with the baby.  When that was dry the baby ate in his high chair while my 3 and 5 year old painted, and as you can see from the interesting placement of green and purple, they had a lot of fun!  When the paint was dry they made trees, houses, people and rocks from modeling clay, I thought all of these things looked very much the same, except the two big rocks my three year old made, but the point is they had fun and learned a lot, and they knew what those things were supposed to be!