Thursday, October 9, 2008

Mt. Minumus Erupts

The model volcano. Isn't it some sort of homeschooling rite of passage? You can't be an official homeschool family until your children have "ooo'ed" and "ahh'ed" at pretend lava spewing out of their homemade creation,right? Well, somebody mail me my membership certificate, because we finally did it!

In my humble opinion, we get an A+ for artistry. I opted to go with a papier-mache model, thinking the kids would love making a mess and have fun painting it. Most of the instructions I found recommended constructing a frame from wire, but one website I found said you could make a frame using masking tape. Don't believe that website! The tape was a pain to work with because it kept sagging, causing the base to curl up once everything dried. Nevertheless, the kids had a great time and it turned out beautifully. They named it Mt. Minimus and imagined it being an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.


Before:


After:


Apparently Mt. Minimus is home to some scary alien-like monsters that like to hang out by the beach. No wonder the island is otherwise uninhabited!


While we excelled in artistry, our technical merit score could have been higher. I'd give us a B-. Just about every lava "recipe" I looked at was slightly different, so I did some tweaking and combining. Maybe that wasn't a good idea. Although I kept explaining to the kids the volcano was not going to shoot lava 3 feet into the sky, I did not expect Mt. Minimus to be so mellow. Below is the most exciting part of the "explosion," after I edited out 10 minutes of very minimal action.


So then, all you pros out there, is this how your volcano explosions looked? Mt. Minimus dried out nicely, so we can try again. Do you have a favorite lava recipe you'd like to share? Just leave it in the comments section and help all the other homeschoolers who have yet to experience the joy of making their very own volcano.

1 comment:

  1. Mt. Minumus - that's hysterical!! :) I was a little sad by ours too. Not that I expected huge...but definitely more than pink fizzle.

    Oh well. Guess that means we'll have to try again, right?? :)

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