Krakatoa.

Apparently, I'm on a roll with homeschooling this week. Today's history lesson included talk about Indonesia and the Dutch East India Company and Krakatoa. So. Of course we had to make a volcano. :) 

Note: We've done this before with our homeschool group, but Noah was 7 and Asher was 5, and Micah obviously wasn't old enough to remember. So I figured it was only fair to do it again. :)

Anyhow. Here's the basic dealio:

1. Get small plastic bottle. (Noah loved this because it meant that I actually bought some small bottles of pop, lol.) In case you're doing this for the first time, know that wide mouth bottles don't work as well.

2. Make homemade play doh. This was my first ever attempt at this because I didn't want to buy a bunch of stuff. I used this recipe and was pretty happy with the results. Easy. I'd already decided ahead of time that we were only going to make one volcano and the boys could just share it. :)

3. Make volcano. So, because it was a gorgeous day, we grabbed our handy cookie sheet (I'm pretty darn sure, btw, that I use my cookie sheets and muffin tins more for homeschooling than for cooking, lol!) and headed to the backyard. Started forming the play doh around the bottle. (Noah said we needed a tall volcano, to be most representative of the actual Krakatoa before it erupted.)

4. Improvise. Shortly into this whole deal, we realized we weren't going to have enough play doh. Grabbed all the leftover Model Magic from Asher's science fair project. Used that. ;)

5. Use funnel and pour baking soda into the bottle. Given that Noah recently did his experiments about acid-base reactions for the science fair, we let him be in charge of proportions.

6. Add the acid part. According to Noah's earlier tests, baking soda and lemon juice were going to yield the best results, so we started with that...adding some food coloring every now and then. After we ran out of lemon juice, we switched to vinegar. Turns out that vinegar reacts faster. :)

7. Play. After a few eruptions (during which Noah and Asher talked about how Krakatoa actually erupted in stages and thus insisted that we were reenacting that), the boys switched to just playing, having given up on being able to make the volcano actually explode like Krakatoa apparently did in the end. They powdered the tray and the volcano with baking soda to make the eruptions more visually exciting. Then they just started pouring baking soda onto the "lava" that had already spilled. 

So. We had fun. Got to talk about both chemical reactions and actual volcanic eruptions. Made a mess. ;)

(Disclaimer: Please know that most weeks are not as "cool" as this week has been with our homeschooling. Though I'm working toward more stuff like this...please don't hold me to these standards, lol.)