Mustafar

I read a few web posts over the summer on various 'things to do with your child in the holidays', and stumbled across the old classic of a vinegar and baking soda volcano.  I knew this would be a hit so suggested this as an idea one day..

Of course when a 6 year old Star Wars fan is told of erupting volcanoes the first thing they thing of is : Mustafar - the lava planet where Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin have that infamous battle.

This is where the idea literally explodes from making a simply plastic bottle volcano to somehow recreating the lava planet with all the appropriate features.

This is what we started with:

A quite deep pet litter tray
A margarine tub
The bottom half of a squash bottle
Lots of newspaper and glue
Some large stones from the garden
Paint
Sand
Air drying clay

Firstly I cut the squash bottle in half and stuck that and the margarine tub to the bottom of the tray to make them sturdy.

Then we set about making the volcano.  Basically this involved using scrunched up newspaper and layering that up to for a cone shape than coating with glue and more paper for a paper mâché effect.  We build some stones up around it too for a more dramatic effect.

Leave to dry.

The nice thing about this project was that we were able to do a little bit every day and so could really see it taking shape.

Once the paper was dry, it was painted black, with red highlights.
While the paint was drying we took the opportunity to make models of a lava skiff and a droid from the air drying clay - these are the things Obi Wan and Anakin fought on - we couldn't make them float like they did in the movie, so used a few lolly sticks instead (artistic license I call it)

We filled the margarine tub with sand so we had a 'quick sand' area - not really from the film, but we both thought it was a cool idea and acted like a trap for any rogue bounty hunters.
We used sand to fill in some of the gaps in the stones too.

Now for the fun bit!!

There are lots of ways to get an erupting volcano, but this is the best way that I have found.

First fill the centre of the volcano half full with hot tap water, add red food colouring (I used quite a bit for a dramatic effect), a few tablespoons of baking soda and a good couple of squirts of washing up liquid (for extra foam).

At this point I handed over control and half filled a beaker with white vinegar.... add the vinegar to the mix and watch it go !!

 




You can keep adding baking soda and vinegar over and over and get multiple eruptions... we even tried this a few days later and it still worked (although it was starting to look a bit manky at this point)

We learnt loads from doing this.  Not just a science project, but it was planned beforehand with drawings, photos, research on the internet about what type of planet it was, what the terrain would be like and so on... and it was definitely lots of fun!