Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Volcano Science Projects

Today we did more volcano science projects from our volcano science packet by Ring of Fire Science.  My nephew, who is also 6, is visiting and really wanted to do school with us.

Ejecta from famous eruptions




Each cotton ball represents 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta (pumice and ash) from a famous eruption in history.  I usually use curriculum like cookbooks, which means I edit or change as necessary to suit us.  This project in the example had an additional eruption but the paper got very crowded and with the ages of the kids, simplifying a little seemed best.  You could do this project with any eruptions you're studying as long as you hunted down the relevant data.

We also did a layers of the earth project.  We did start the day with  a bit of reading on volcanoes and the Earth's layers.  Then we did a short layers of the Earth Montessori work.

 Our second project entailed creating the layers of the earth to scale.

Layers of the Earth

The favorite part of this project was using the compass. Neither of the boys had used one before and they enjoyed turning it and figuring out how to set the distance with the ruler.  It was a great chance to talk about radius and diameter of circles as well as the metric system of measuring.  Again I modified the project by adding more colors.

They're looking forward to more later in the week. 

5 comments:

Jenny said...

Oh, I love the volcanoes. We are starting the layers of the earth this week, so I will add this. Did they have trouble holding the compass and keeping it in the right place? We were having trouble here, so I wondered if maybe I was showing them incorrectly.

toady mama said...

Jenny - Yes, specially on the smallest one for the core. It helped to add paper under the one they were working on. Our table is wood, so it's slippery and hard. We also talked about finding the little hole the compass made and using that to recenter and start again. Also, I let them use my compass which I used to use for my metal work so it's a high quality one. The school quality ones are much harder to use in general. Have fun!

w said...

great project! in the day of gps, glad you got out the compass!

toady mama said...

Thanks!

Unknown said...

Love the cotton ball eruption idea! Thanks for stopping by and sharing your link!

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