Wicked How-To’s

Today I’m going to show you how to build a homemade volcano using two different methods: the first one is the old-fashioned baking soda and vinegar one, and the other is going to use the recently-made-famous diet-coke and mentos reaction that you see Kari over there on the left demonstrating . The way we’re going to go about constructing it is with some air-dried clay for the volcano itself, some wood for decoration, a bottle to contain and direct the explosion, and something such as food coloring or kool-aid to color the liquid with so that it’s orange or red, like lava would be, to make it more realistic. Also, a little tip: if you’d like your lava to be

experience actually teaching science). Let’s get started.

Part 1: Introduction and necessary materials and equipment

Part 2: How do volcanoes work and what effect do they have on the earth?

Part 3: How to build a model volcano

Part 4: Eruption method #1, baking soda and vinegar

Part 5: Eruption method #2, diet-coke and mentos

For those of you who live in a cave and have completely missed out on the internet’s love affair with diet-coke and mentos, go here and here (notice how many views that video has ), that should take care of it.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Here’s a great page over at Storm the Castle that’s got a bunch of different homemade volcano projects with instructions for each one.

The Discovery Kids site has got a WICKED COOL setup where you can see an interactive graphic of how a volcano works plus they tell you how to build your own.

And, of course, you can always just buy your own volcano making kit like this one from Amazon.