Volcano fun

I love looking back through my old photos. (Remember? They were lost for a while.) I enjoy seeing the vacations we took and the normal every-day stuff we did that I thought was interesting enough to snap a few pictures. A couple of days ago I shared pictures of a project that my youngest enjoyed doing. I'm gonna show you some more that I found.
A couple of years ago (when Timothy was going through his spiked hair phase) I found a unit study on volcanoes. It had several suggestions...but the ones that caught my eye used play clay. {wink} You know what I'm talking about without me having to mention a name brand. We had tubs and tubs of it. Since I had two teenagers and a pre-teen in the house, it was just going to waste. So we dug it out and he started making volcanoes.
First he made a couple of models of what he thought volcanoes look like.

Then we moved to the kitchen...cuz things were about to get messy. I took the tray out of the microwave (because it had a raised edge to catch any spills) and cut a plastic bathroom cup down to about an inch tall. I put some baking soda in the bottom of the cup and put vinegar into four other cups. Timothy selected four colors of play clay and we tinted the vinegar to match. The idea is to make the volcano errupt, then put clay everywhere that the "lava" went...building it up as you go. Here we've done white and green. It's not a fast project because you have to sop up all the vinegar before you can put the clay down.

Pour in the blue vinegar...

...mentally map where it spread,

sop it up and...

...put down the lava.

Repeat with red.


And here we have a finished volcano model.
We had a lot of fun. We ended up cutting it in half and looking at all the layers. Somehow, I failed to get a picture of that. My oldest was watching me select the photos yesterday and asked to see that picture--Huny, it doesn't exist. She couldn't believe it. {sigh} It's true, I'm not perfect.
Oh well...let me know how it goes if you decide to make one.