Daddy and Charlie spent the morning making dinosaurs. I sat with my feet up, doing nothing (that would’ve been a good idea).
When the dinosaurs were ready the next thing on our 3-year-olds mind was, where is the volcano?
The boys went outside to build a mud volcano. They decorated it with Dinosaurs and other things they found in the garden.
I love watching them work together. They both encourage each others ingenuity.
Finally, they were ready to show off their efforts. I was impressed. What do you think?
After the preparation was complete. It was time to begin the experiment.
It started well.
The ingredients were organised on the kitchen side. Then things started getting chucked in the volcano crater (bowl).
It soon became apparent that the planning had stopped at getting the ingredients out of the cupboard.
The first 3 attempts failed, but we had some serious fun. Plus attempt 4 actually worked.
Attempt 6 was my favourite (the grand finale).
Watch our failures and successes here:
What you need to make it work
Bicarbonate of soda (NOT baking powder)
300 ml Malt vinegar (NOT Cider Vinegar)
100ml water
Washing up liquid
Food colour (we’d run out by this point)
Method
100ml of water
Choose if you add 300ml vinegar to the water or bicarbonate of soda.
Add a squidge of washing up liquid
Add food colour
For the eruption add the vinegar or bicarbonate of soda to your mixture. The ingredient you didn’t add at stage 2.
For fun try it both ways, we did (attempt 5).
After our failures, we were pleased with our accomplishment. Great life lesson for the little ones too.
If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try, try again
Let’s explore this further
I was now fully swept up in the excitement of it all. I had imagined a dramatic volcanic eruption. This image led to attempt 6.
Mentos vs Diet Coke (Other fizzy drinks would work)
I definitely recommend you do this outside. It’s pretty sticky.
Method
One full bottle of diet fizzy drink (don’t drink some first like my family).
Add 13 mentos to a tube. I used a rolled-up toilet roll.
Place a piece of card on the bottom of the tube to stop mentos falling out.
Hold tube over the top of the diet drink.
Quickly drop the mentos in the bottle.
Finally, the children decided they’d add all of the leftover ingredients to a bowl.
It’s fair to say we all learnt a lot, had a lot of fun and created some amazing memories.
Not to mention the £12 it cost us in failed attempts!
Don’t be like us and waste money or do and have a lot of fun.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.