Volcano Extensions w/ Play Dough

A little while back I posted about how we used Types of Mountains Nomenclature cards from Montessori Printshop. Here is a quick link back to that post. 

This morning we focused on just the Volcanoes. We used the cards from the Mountain set and did a three part lesson on the names of the mountains.  

This is Mt. Fuji...

Can you show me Mt. Fuji....

What is this Volcano called?

Since making mountains out of play dough was such a big hit (we did this many times since the last post) I thought we could try another approach that helped see where the volcanoes are in relation to the continents. 

We used blue play dough for the ocean and green for the continents. I just made up a quick batch using my favorite recipe- if you make them erupt you want to make sure that it's ok if you "ruin" it.  I help set up most of the World Map with Barrett helping me form the continents.  Next, I told Barrett to place the Volcanoes on the correct continent based on the cards we had and left him to explore the tray. 

We had one for North America, South America, Asia, and Asia/Europe. 

Finally, the best part of all... I brought out the vinegar and baking soda for him to cause each volcano to erupt. We officially ran out of red food coloring but I recommend that for effect if you have it :) 

There is another really great resource over at Discovery Kids: Volcano Explorer that allows you to learn about the types of volcanoes and types of eruptions they have. 

I would love to get/make some three part cards for the types of volcanoes (a subgroup of the types of mountains) and hopefully will get to that soon! Let me know if you would benefit from a free resource like that!

Happy schooling!

-Lauren

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