The Science Fair

Our Homeschool group had a Science fair and Performance Day to wrap up our cooperative classes for the year.  For our project we decided to learn about volcanoes.

To prepare, we researched Volcanoes by getting some books from the Library and watching some videos online.  There are a lot of great videos on-line about volcanoes and footage of eruptions but one we really enjoyed was this you-tube documentary on Mount St. Helens.The kids each then dictated a report to me of what they learned.

Science Fair

After they knew a bit about volcanoes we researched the different ways to make a model of a volcano. William decided to make a salt dough Volcano. We then made the Volcano, painted it and researched ways to make it explode. We decided to run 3 different tests to see which would be the best explosion. Our first test was the traditional baking soda and Vinegar chemical reaction. You can watch our 1st experiment here.
The second test was using Coke and mentos.  We discovered that you need to put the mentos directly into the coke bottle.   Finally we tested our volcano with hydrogen peroxide and yeast.  We then designed a poster for our project.

Luke and William hold the poster and judging sheet for our Science fair project.

Our Volcano display.

Demonstration and judging at the Science fair.

After the science fair a number of the kids presented skits they had prepared during the past 10 weeks and some of the children shared poems or songs they had memorized.  Luke, Miriam and William recited a poem "The twelve apostles" and sang a song about Lent.  Miriam recited a poem entitled "The Only Girl" with a big friend Anastasia.  They also joined their class in singing a song about the seven continents.  All in all it was a great day!