How to make a fun chemistry class in the kitchen safe and fun for your child? Let's try to conduct a real chemical experiment - a volcano in an ordinary dinner plate. This experiment will require the following materials and reagents:
- a piece of plasticine (we will make the volcano itself out of it);
- plate;
- acetic acid;
- drinking soda;
- dishwashing liquid;
- dye.
The components listed above can be easily found in every home or in the hardware department of a nearby store. They are safe enough, but like any chemistry experiment, this one will also require compliance with safety regulations.
Description of work:
- From plasticine we make the base of the volcano and a cone with a hole. We connect them, carefully closing the edges. We get a plasticine model of a volcano with slopes. The internal dimension of our structure should have a circle with a diameter of about 100 - 200 mm. Before installing the layout in a plate or tray, we check our volcano for leaks: we collect water into it and see if it lets it through. If everything is in order - set the layout of the volcano in a plate.
- Now on to the next part - cookinglava. We put one tablespoon of baking soda, dishwashing liquid in the same volume and a dye that will color the future eruption in the color corresponding to real lava into our model of a plasticine volcano. To achieve maximum similarity, you can use food coloring, children's paints for drawing, and even ordinary beetroot juice. This chemistry experience should recreate in the eyes of a child a volcanic eruption in nature.
- To start the eruption, pour a quarter of a cup of vinegar into the crater. In the course of a chemical reaction, the combination of soda and acetic acid leads to the formation of a carbonic acid s alt, which is an unstable compound and immediately decomposes into water and carbon dioxide. It is this foaming process that will give our eruption the appearance of a real volcano with lava flows along the slopes. Chemical experiment completed.
Demonstration of an active volcano at school
Besides the kind of safe eruption demonstration described above, there are many more ways to get a volcano on the table. But it is better to carry out these experiments in specially prepared rooms - school chemical laboratories. The most famous from the school bench is the Böttger volcano. For its implementation, ammonium dichromate is needed, which is poured in a slide, a depression is made at its top. A piece of cotton wool moistened with alcohol is placed in the crater, which is set on fire. The reaction produces nitrogen, water and chromium oxide. The ongoing reaction is very similar to the eruption of an active volcano.
For memorization, as well as for the development of erudition in children, it is good to associate such a chemical experiment with some of the most famous example of an eruption in the history of human civilization, for example, with the explosion of Vesuvius in Italy, especially since it is wonderful and beneficial for horizons can be illustrated by a reproduction of the great painting by Karl Bryullov "The Last Day of Pompeii" (1827-1833).
Not without interest for children will also be a story about a rather rare and useful profession of a volcanologist. These specialists constantly observe already extinct and currently active volcanoes, make assumptions about the possible time and strength of their future eruptions.
