Author: Shelly Cummings 

  TEACHER NOTE: Not my ideas, just passing them on:

                        The Volcano

  Materials: 
        soda or liter bottle 
        baking pan 
        moist soil
        1 T. baking soda
        1 cup vinegar
        red food coloring

  Process: 
        1) Place the baking pan on the grass, and set the soda bottle in 
        the center of the pan.
        
        2) Mound and shape the most soil around the bottle to form a
        mountain. Bring the soil right up to the top of the bottle's
        opening but don't get soil in the bottle.

        3) Pour 1 T. baking soda into the bottle.

        4) Color 1 cup vinegar with the red food coloring.

        5) Pour the colored vinegar into the bottle. Stand back and watch 
        red form spray out the top and down the mountain of dirt, like 
        lava from a volcano.

        Make a volcano Use a 35 mm tube used to hold film.  Smooth 
        home-made flour dough or dough that  air dries.   Place dough 
        around the sides of the tube to form the shape of a volcano.  
        Paint dough brown  and let sit overnight to dry in an aluminum 
        pie plate.  (be sure to put names on the pies plate for the next 
        day)  Next day let the volcanoes erupt.  Put one teaspoon of 
        baking soda in all of the tubes.  Add red food coloring to
        small amount of vinegar.  (need about 1 tablespoon for each
        volcano) Add about 1 tablespoon of red vinegar to soda mixture in
        tube. Mixture will bubble out like a volcano erupting. Start
        collecting pie pans early in the year so each child may erupt their
        volcano at school and at home without making a mess!

                                Mary Jo Ayres

        I add orange food coloring to the vinegar. When it "erupts," it 
        looks like hot lava! It's a fun activity but I suggest that you
        remind the children that this is very safe and will not really
        explode when you mix the ingredients. Each year, I find at least
        one child who does have this concern(but usually doesn't verbalize
        it until I reassure the whole class.)

                A valcano experiment taken from The World of Nature 
                                by Wendy Pfeffer:

        1) With children helping to measure and pour, mix one-half cup of
        water, several drops of red food coloring, one-quarter cup
        dishwashing liquid, and one-quarter cup of vinegar into a pitcher
        or clean bottle.

        2) Add one-quarter cup of baking soda to a small, clean and empty 
        can or jar.  Take the children, the can and the pitcher of liquid 
        you prepared and go outside.  Bury the can in an outdoor sandbox 
        or dirt pile; be sure the lip of the can or jar is sticking out 
        of the sand.

        3)  Pour a little of the mixture from the pitcher into the can 
        and watch it bubble up and over-just like lava from a valcano.  
        Tell children that the baking soda mixes with the vinegar and makes
        a gas called carbon dioxide that acts like the bubbles in a soda.
        In a real valcano, there is gas which causes liquid rock to bubble
        in the same way.

        Let the children take turns describibg the experiment and the 
        results (pictures) Play the first part of Igor Stravinsky's Rite 
        of Spring and encourage children to pretend they are valcanos or
        earthquakes as they move to the music.

        Read:  What is a Valcano? by Chris Arvetis (Macmillan)