V is for Volcano

I was feeling very preschool-teacher-ish this afternoon, and you know what? It was so much fun! I don't see myself enjoying that as a career, but I did love teaching my own kids. Not that I don't teach them all the time, but this was more formal. I don't plan to homeschool, but I think it would be great to do a lot more of this kind of stuff when we move and I'm not working full time. And now I am rambling!

Anyway, it all started when I went to get vinegar and baking soda out of the pantry. We're studying chemical reactions at school, and I was surprised to learn that most of my students didn't know what happened when you mixed the two-- so I plan to show them tomorrow. Of course, Nikos walked in and asked me what I was doing. I made the spontaneous decision that we needed to play with vinegar and baking soda, right then and there! We loaded baking soda into a small cup, set the cup in a large baking dish right in the middle of the kitchen floor, and all sat around it (Maya had joined us by that time). They shrieked and giggled about the "erupting volcano" on our kitchen floor, and requested that I do it again and again (which I obliged until I realized I was running low on supplies needed for school tomorrow!).

Once the mess was cleaned up, I suggested that we go and color pictures of volcanoes. Both kids were SO excited! I handed them paper and crayons, but started looking through my craft supplies to see if there was anything fun we could use. I found some brown ribbon, which I glued onto their papers to form a volcano. Maya promptly ripped her ribbons off, but Nikos very carefully drew in the "magma and hot lava." We talked about different shapes of volcanoes (cindercone, shield, dome, and stratovolcano-- thank you, 5th grade reading program, for teaching me this!). We talked about how this volcano looked like a letter "V" if you turned it upside-down, and how the word "volcano" in fact STARTED with the "v" sound (Nikos found this thrilling, for real). Maya was more into the coloring, but Nikos was just soaking it all in like a sponge. And while a lot of what I was telling him was 4th and 5th grade science material, he retained a lot! Which made me happy, because science is my absolute favorite subject to teach. I see a lot more projects and experiments in our future-- today was so fun!

Here's our boy, hard at work adding lava to his cindercone volcano...

And the finished product! Not bad for something I just made up on the spot! :)