educational fair

We headed to our first homeschool educational fair in February. Isaiah decided the week before the fair that he would like to make a volcano. No problem, I thought, sounds like the perfect project for an 8 year old boy and I have lots of baking soda and vinegar. We googled homemade volcaoes. I suggested making one of paper mache, he really wanted to make one out of clay. So we took off to the store for 10 pounds of flour and 3 pounds of salt and later that day we had...



The clay sort of slid down the bottle we placed in the middle- a consequence of doing it all at once instead of in stages, but we had only 6 days before the fair and it needed time to dry. Isaiah wrote up a nice little informative sheet and we gathered everyone around for our explosion. And it didn't work. :( We searched the church's pantry for more baking soda and vinegar, and it still didn't have enough oomph to overflow the bottle. So we sprinked baking soda all over the volcano and dumped vinegar over that (Isaiah's idea) so at least it had the effect of a volcano. Oh well, live and learn. Next time we'll start earlier and have time for a practice run before the big event. I have to say Isaiah stayed very calm throughout the entire thing and didn't loose his cool over a falled project. For that, I was quite proud of him.