Italy

Since Italy is the home to some of the most famous volcanoes in the world, we took the opportunity to study volcanoes during our “trip” to Italy. First we watched a few short videos about volcanoes, and then made our own volcano and had fun erupting it!

Making the volcano was VERY easy! We just took a tall, glass juice bottle, and used crumpled sheets of paper and wide packing tape to make the form of the volcano around the glass jar.

Next we made a very quick, simple salt dough recipe by mixing together 1 cup water, 1 cup salt, and about 3 cups of flour (start with less flour and just keep adding and kneading the dough until it becomes a good play-dough type consistency).

We had some “sticky fun” covering our paper mountain with the salt dough. Then put our volcano outside to dry in the sun.

The next day, we painted it! Mostly brown, but a little red streaming down from the top to look like lava. We gave it another day to dry and then came the fun part – eruption!

Again, very simple! We just poured about 2 or 3 tablespoons of baking soda into the opening of our volcano and added about 4 drops of red food coloring. Then for the actual eruption you just pour in some vinegar over the baking soda and watch it bubble up and overflow!

So much fun!!

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