1º British: Make your own volcano at home!

As we have just studied the volcanoes, let’s finish this part with a special activity. First of all, let’s precise two important things

1. It is NOT necessary to make the volcano to erupt!

2. In case you want to run the full experiment (and make it to erupt) please ask your parents for help and supervision.

Are you good at arts&crafts? Because this week you have to do your own volcano!

You can build one out of clay, papier-mâché, plastic bags or even stiff card stock bent into a cone shape around a jar or water bottle. One of the main issues here is to see your creativity and solving-problems skills: how can you do it when you can not go to a shop to buy specifical materials? Be creative and think how you can recycle what you have at home!

Look at the following examples:

Example 1: you can use a plastic bottle. Cut it and cover it with a black pastic bag. Add some transparent film and paint it to simulate the lava. A final touch of cotton will look as the smoke:

Photo 2: A clay (plastilina, arcilla...) volcano

Photo 3: papier-mâché or old newspapers

And... what if you want to complete the experiment and make your volcano to erupt? This is a quite safe project to perform with kids (and parents). The safest way is to use baking soda and vinegar to create foamy reaction. You can add dish soap to enhance the texture and a little red food coloring or ketchup for color. If you follow the instructions of this article (a useful demostration video at the end) it is highly unlikely that your volcano will hurt anyone (unless they happen to be allergic to any of the materials used in this project!).

How can I evaluate this activity?

Make sure to take some photos (4 or 5 will be enough) during the creation process and the final video (pm4 or avi format) of yourself making the volcano to erupt (to show me that you really do it and you are not just using some picture from internet!). Then send both photos and video to acarriles@educa.jcyl.es

This activity is mandatory and you will receive a mark for it (that will cover the 20% of your final score this term). If you don’t do it, do it out of time or just copy&paste from internet, your mark here will be zero (0).

Are you ready? 3, 2, 1... enjoy!