Volcano

My kids have been bugging me to teach them how to make a volcano for a really long time.  I got the idea to start doing "Science Saturdays" with them, and decided that this was the perfect project to start with.  I didn't want to deal with the whole hassle of making a volcano out of paper mache, so we simplified it and duct taped two plastic cups together and cut a hole in one for the top.  I thought it would be fun to add food coloring to the baking soda and vinegar to talk about color mixing as well.  We did blue in the baking soda and red in the vinegar.

Lincoln got the honor of pouring in the first of the vinegar.

It only fizzed a little bit.  I didn't actually look up any directions for this experiment, and looking back I probably should have used smaller cups.

So I used a funnel to add more baking soda, then let Savannah add more vinegar.  Then it worked much better.

When we were finished we discussed that baking soda is a base and vinegar is an acid and how a base and an acid cause a chemical reaction, which makes the foam.