As the warmer weather arrives, the children have been showing a great interest in the sandbox outside. Usually the children are digging either holes or making muffins and cakes for the educators to eat.
One day Liam asked if I wanted to play with him and the two of us also ended up in the sandbox. As I started to make a sand castle Liam turned to me and said “I don’t want to make that, let’s make a volcano.” In agreement the two of us started to place sand on the table top and as he dumped I patted it down. As the sand started to take form it caught Mason, Colin, Penelope and Maddie’s attention, who asked if they could join us. Mason asked “what are you making?” Liam was quick to say “a volcano because it has hot lava.”
Over the next few days volcanos seemed to be the topic of discussion. Children asked many questions like “will it squirt up? Will the sand break? Can the lava burn people and animals? Are volcanos real? With Mary having only a few answers for them, she decided to turn this into a hands-on activity allowing the children to visually see the reaction.
On Tuesday, Mary had gathered a bucket full of materials for the children to make a sand volcano outside. The children fostered their fine motor skills as they used spoons and shovels to gather sand for our bowl. When the bowl was full Mary asked “what will happen if I flip it over?”. Liam excitedly said “it will be a volcano!” Penelope shared that the dirt was too dry and it would fall down. Continuing the conversations, I then asked “how can we make it stick together?” They all yelled out “with water.” Using the watering can we gathered water and brought it back to the bowl. The children took turns adding small amounts of water while others stirred the sand to see if it was now wet enough to hold itself together. The children then patted it down and agreed it was time to flip it over. When Mason took off the bowl Liam yelled out once again “now it is a volcano!” Hannah spoke up and said that volcanos have a hole in the top, so our next step was to create a hole in the top. This now was starting to look like a volcano, but instead of jumping right into the science portion of the activity, we gathered and Mary shared some information about volcanos from her book. Here the children learned five steps before an explosive eruption.
1. Magma Creation=extreme heat melts rock that becomes magma
2. Magma Pressure= magma rises and collects in chambers then the dissolved gases rise as pressure decreases
3. The Trigger=Eventually, the combination of rising magma and expanding gas causes immense pressure within the chamber. The eruption is triggered when this pressure becomes too great for the overlying rock to contain
4. The Eruption =Once the pathway opens, the magma rushes upward to the surface then the sudden drop in pressure causes the trapped gas to violently burst outward, sending lava, ash, rocks, and toxic gases into the air.
5. Once the magma exits the volcano, it is called lava.
We took our new information and went back to the table where the children had two ingredients: baking soda and vinegar knowing that the combination would give us a gas reaction. They took turns adding the baking soda into the surface hole of our sand volcano, before adding in the best part being the vinegar. As the reaction took place, the children cheered and gasped in excitement.
Our simple volcano experiment lasted the morning with the building of new volcanos in the making. The children were so excited that they invited the children from ps1 and Isabel to join us. The true learning took place when some of the children could recall each step, in order and how they tried very hard to share this new knowledge and new vocabulary with them.
