Volcanoes!

Any of you who know Riley knows that his love of dinosaurs evolved into a love of pretty much anything remotely related to dinosaurs, especially volcanoes. I am amazed at how he will sit and listen to non-fiction books from the library about these topics, and even more amazed at the information he retains from them. He's even watched several documentary videos on volcanoes, dinosaurs, and recently alligators/crocodiles and sharks with us.

For his birthday, Papa and Nana bought him a science kit I had been eying that advertised activities like a color changing volcano and an underwater volcano among other experiments. Basically it is a beginner's chemistry set. We had been waiting for a day when daddy was home and had time to go through some of the experiments with the kids. Riley had been asking pretty much every day since his birthday in September to make the volcanoes :).

We had a day finally the first week of November when we set aside the morning to work on a few of the experiments.
The first one was the color changing erupting volcanoes.

Both the kids were very excited to help. (I think daddy had a bit of fun too, haha). They took turns adding the ingredients to make the mini-volcanoes, and make them erupt and then change colors.
It was pretty cool to watch them fiz and change.
I think we have a budding scientist on our hands. Here is he hard at work shaking the test tube for the next experiment we tried, which was our favorite, the underwater volcano.

While Riley took this very seriously, Naomi not so much...
It's hard to see in the photos, but the volcano at the bottom of the tube would erupt and fizz over the top. We did this one quite a few times :). We also did a sunset in a tube and color changing crystals. I think the kids really enjoyed the morning, and are looking forward to another day when we can try a few more experiments.
Click the video below to watch a few brief clips of our volcano day! :)