Home-Made Volcano Experiment

This ugly thing right here is supposed to be spectacular volcano
about to erupt and create havoc on all mankind!

This year, I decided to buy more learning books for my kids, as opposed to story books and picture books (which I love, by the way!).

One of the things I wanted to teach my kids is about the world, the different people and cultures around us, their food, their festivals, their beliefs, etc. Other stuff I immediately wanted them to know are about Egyptians and dinosaurs, simply because these are quite popular topics and there are lots of references on them.

We now have a huge National Geographic book at home which takes a look at world maps, and analyses different continents, countries and peoples -- it's our reference book every few nights (or when Mama has the energy after work to "teach"!).

Maryam immediately took to wanting to learn about Egyptians while Musa was keen about the volcanoes. From looking at pictures of volcanoes in the book, we went online to youtube to see some pictures of eruptions and the flow of red lava. There are many great visuals there to hold a child's interest.

From there, we went on to see other videos of home-made volcanoes. It was Musa who clicked on the tutorials on volcano-making and insisted that his Mama and Ayah watched together. He's been insisting that we buy the "ingredients" to make the volcano experiment at home since.

So last night, that's exactly what we did. Very easy to do actually. Total cost was less than RM40 to make 2 volcanoes -- one for Musa and one for Maryam. And we did the project in about an hour and a half.

I wanted it to be a re-usable volcano, so decided to build the volcano on a styrofoam board -- something water-proof that could be washed over and over again.

For the cavity of the mountain, we used plastic cups. We then plastered the clay around it to make it look like a mountain. Clay used was the cheap plasticine which costs about RM1.20 a pack. We bought 11 packs to make two mountains.

Tip: to make it easy to build your mountain, work by putting clay on the rim of the cup and work your way down from there, finally "pasting" the bottom of the cup to the styrofoam board.

The styrofoam board was pre-cut to fit into a plastic basin so that later when the lava spills out of the mountain, it is all contained in the basin and you won't have so much mess to clean up.

We decorated the styrofoam board to make it look like a village at the bottom of the mountain -- there were houses, a sheep and a tree, etc. You can use real leaves, stones and wooden bark to make it more realistic.

When the "scene" was ready, we dunked in a whole tub of baking powder into the cavity of the mountain, added some orange food colouring for effect, and the kids poured in the vinegar to start the eruption process. (Apparently, you can also create the same effect with diet Coke which is less sticky than Coke and mentos original flavour).

Because the whole thing was water-proof, we could do it over and over again. We'll probably do it again tonight! So excuse us, we've got some villages to destroy with our red hot lava!