Thursday, March 8, 2012

Journey to the center of a Volcano

Still working our way through the wonderful world of volcanoes and it is amazing how many experiments and projects that are out there on the subject.

Here are a few that we found the most entertaining:

Cake Batter Lava
You need: volcano, army men, cake batter, ruler,

The original instructions on this said to use regular cake batter and add only water, well I didn't want to waste the chance to make cake so I went ahead and mixed the batter like I normally would and used the left over batter for cake pops.

Next placed our toy volcano on baking pan, and measured increments in 1 inch sections where we carefully arranged army men.

Finally we poured the "lava" into the volcano and watched the fun.

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This experiment was great fun, but it also helped introduced the concept of Viscosity and really helped them understand how lava moves and how land is changed.

After the army men were all dead we too the pan outside and left it in a sunny space. The cake batter hardened. Just like lava would!

Another fun experiment we did was using Jello.
Just make a jello mold. Place the jiggly thing on a flat surface(we used a pan) then the kiddos stacked two large blocks and we placed the pan on top. They took turns moving the large blocks back and forth to demonstrate the movements of the plates. The jello shook and moved and we discussed what would happen if the "mountain" was made of something else and what they thought would happen.

Then we had a snack.

I love projects that can double as food preparation!

To tie this unit up Little Man created a book on Volcanoes using a three pronged folder and manilla paper.

He created a brochure on volcanoes drawing different examples including geysers that went into the folder. Then drew and labeled diagrams of Volcanoes and the Earth. After the fun stuff he made a list of fast facts.

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