Let’s Make Homemade Volcanoes!

Who doesn’t love watching a homemade volcano erupt? The first thing that my son wanted to play with in our new science discovery box (12 days of experiments) was the volcano, but unfortunately, it wasn’t all that exciting. My little guy just kept trying to figure out how to make the eruption bigger. No problem, kiddo! I’ve got this! We’re going to make our own!

What the hand does, the mind remembers. – Dr. Montessori

We started out by building our volcanoes out of air dry clay. I had previously picked up some on Amazon for another project. Find it here: Crayola Air Dry Clay. At first, I had to knead and warm up the clay in order to soften it up and help the little guy get started. Once it softened, we started out by building a flat platform for the volcano to stand on.

Next, we grabbed a bottle to use for the inside of the volcano. In hindsight, I would have gone with a slightly larger bottle. We ended up using one of those small allergy medicine bottles (empty and washed, of course). You can use whatever size bottle that you want, but keep in mind that you want it to be big enough to hold ingredients, but small enough to have the eruptions come out of the top of the volcano. We placed the bottle on top of the clay platform and then slowly built up the sides of the volcano around it, eventually running some clay over the top of the bottle to give it a nice mountainous look.

After the volcanoes were built, we played with the clay to add slides for the lava to run down and a pool for the bottom of the volcano (where we anticipated that the lava would collect).

Per the instructions on the air dry clay, we allowed it to fully dry for two days. Then, just for fun, we took painted our volcanoes! For mine, I just slapped on some black chalk paint. I knew that the paint might run during our “eruption” because I didn’t put any sealant over it, but I wasn’t too worried. I didn’t plan to keep these around after our experiment. To my surprise, even after several eruptions, it still had most of the black chalk paint on it.

Enough looking at these…we were ready to see them erupt!

Make sure that your volcanoes are set up on something that will make for easy cleanup. It can get a bit messy.

We tried a couple of different methods, but our favorite (by far!) was the baking soda, dish soap, vinegar method…

1. Add 2 tablespoons baking soda
2. Add 1 tablespoon dish soap (any kind)
3. Add 5-7 drops red food coloring and yellow food coloring
4. Pour 1 oz. vinegar on top and wait for a few seconds… you’ll see a bubbling, slow flowing, exciting and fun volcanic eruption!

Once we watched our volcanoes erupt, we decided that we wanted to watch it happen from the bottom up, so we grabbed a soda bottle, cleaned it out, took the label off and repeated the experiment inside it (we doubled the recipe so that it would build enough of an eruption to reach the top of the bottle)!

Guys, this experiment is so easy and fun and our little guy thought it was amazing! But, let’s talk about the BONUS to this experiment…

We rolled a devotional into this experiment. In case you are new to the blog, I’ll get you caught up. We have been enjoying a certain children’s devotional so much! It’s called Indescribable: 100 Devotions for Kids About God and Science, and you can find it on Amazon by clicking here. As we were using the clay to build the volcano, we talked about how neat it must have been to form the mountains, trees, and Earth the way that God did in the beginning. This hands-on play, paired with the conversation about how God made things like mountains, gave him an entirely new and fun perspective on God and creation.

Art, Bible Study, and Science and the little guy had a blast! Win, win!

I hope you have enjoyed this mini tutorial and we would love to hear about your volcano-building experiences! Happy learning!