Toddler Science: Making a Volcano

I've been talking about making a volcano with Noah forever.  For some reason, I looked up a recipe that called for heavy duty hydrogen peroxide at some point, and then I lost motivation after I realized I didn't even know where to buy it.  

This morning, Noah, Maya and I were exploring on the Discovery Kids volcano explorer site to learn more about volcanoes to get us pumped for making one soon, when we started messing around with the build your own volcano option.

Needless to say, the kids were pumped.  Noah said, "Let's go make a vocano erupt RIGHT NOW!"  

Off we went to the kitchen with absolutely no plan.  I randomly grabbed my baking baking soda, some white vinegar, and then I realized we needed to make the volcano itself.  I eyed a bottle of Orangina in the pantry, dumped it into a glass, grabbed our model magic modeling material and some red food coloring and we were on our way to making our volcano. 

Don't let her fool you. She sat in the chair for one minute of this experiment.

Noah did everything from putting the modeling material on the bottle to dumping the baking soda in the volcano.

Noah put model magic modeling material on the outside of an Orangina bottle to make our volcano.

Next, Noah added baking soda to the volcano. The messier, the better!

Then he added the food coloring and the vinegar.  

My little scientist hard at work!

After a few turns, Noah wanted to watch me make the volcano erupt.

I see a lot of these in our future. So easy and so fun.

Since Noah had so much fun when the volcano exploded, we made it erupt 7 or 8 times.  We kept adding baking soda, food coloring and vinegar.  The modeling material sort of thinned out by the end, and Noah told me it was because the volcano is so powerful. Toddler science is fun for everyone.