Friday, May 21, 2010

Volcano Day- May 18

May 18th is the anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.  I lived in eastern Washington at the time and although I was still a toddler I remember coming home from church and having our house and yard covered in ash.  My mom collected several jars of the ash and when we moved to California a few years later we would take the jars to school each year for show and tell.  Eventually all the jars were broken and we don't have any of the ash left but I decided it would be an interesting childhood memory to share with my kids.  So we this week we celebrated volcano day.
We started off by watching a short, simple video about volcanoes on How Stuff Works.com.  I liked that it was not too complicated or scary!  We discussed the terms volcano, magma, lava, and erupt.  We reviewed the word igneous from an earlier lesson on the types of rocks.
Then we did a mini-book on volcanoes from crayola.com
 Finally we made a little volcano in the sink.  I put some baking soda in the bottom of a cup and added a few drops of red food coloring.  Then I slowly added vinegar and the kids watched it "erupt".  We did this several times because they were enjoying it so much.  There was no clean up since we were doing it in the sink.
This seemed about the right level to approach the topic of volcanoes for the first introduction and we had a great time.
Find more ideas from other mothers at preschool corner.

1 comment:

  1. I love the baking soda and vinegar trick. And how crazy that your house was covered in ash. I bet T thought that story was pretty cool. Thanks for the links!

    ReplyDelete