How to Make a DIY Volcano that Erupts
While our homeschool style varies, one thing we do consistently is unit studies. We decide on a topic and then spend a week or more learning about that topic. Recently, we learned about volcanoes and wanted to share with you how to make a DIY volcano that erupts.
In an effort to make the volcano look as real as possible, we chose to build ours out of dirt. I simply used a circular baking pan and placed a bottle in the center. I covered the top of the bottle with aluminum foil so the dirt would not fall inside as we were shaping the volcano. We added a little bit of grass in order to mimic foliage.
Once we were ready to “erupt” our volcano, I simply poked a hole through the aluminum foil. Because we had everything we needed except baking soda the cost was minimal. I purchased two boxes of baking soda, but ended up only needing one. I had a gallon of vinegar and used about half of it. We created many eruptions using food color to dye the vinegar. I do recommend placing some newspapers around the area in order to catch any drips. We didn’t do this at first and got some dye on our table.
The kids mostly took turns making the volcano erupt (Losh didn’t want to). They liked seeing the different color combinations forming on the paper towels and seeing how big of an eruption they could get. We didn’t pour measured amounts of baking soda or vinegar, but found that the more vinegar we used (and the faster it was poured) the better eruption we got.
If you want to see the video we made, feel free to watch the following. I apologize for the endless clicking of the camera.. I’ve been learning how to shoot in manual mode and took approximately 1,000,000 pictures of the kids and volcano.
Have you ever built an erupting DIY Volcano?
