My two daughters have been obsessed with volcanoes ever since we watched live footage earlier this summer from Yellowstone National Park. A few weeks ago, we decided to dig into all things volcano! We made sure to include some fun science experiments involving our Beaker Creatures Volcano Reactor.

Previously we've conducted various activities that involved Beaker Creature reactor pods and they are always a huge hit. Even though I knew my girls would be thrilled with just using the pod, I wanted to take the experiment a step further and create a second reaction on our own. There were a few extra project suggestions included inside the reactor box, so we ended up gathering the ingredients for the foaming volcano project. We pre-measured everything we would need and brought all of our supplies outside.

Experiment Ingredients

Volcano Experiment Round 1

First up, we unwrapped our reactor pod and placed it inside of our volcano. We added water and watched as the eruption took place! The girls were just as excited as always and they eagerly waited to see which creature would be inside. Once the volcano finished erupting, we carefully pulled out the Beaker Creature and cleaned him and the volcano off with water. We placed our creature back into the volcano and got ready for eruption number two.

Volcano Experiment Round 2

We took a second to discuss the items we had gathered: baking soda, vinegar, food coloring, and dish soap. I explained that the base was the baking soda and that it reacts to various acids, which in this case, would be the vinegar. When the baking soda touches the vinegar it creates a chemical reaction and something new, carbon dioxide (gas), is formed. We’ve done baking soda/vinegar experiments before, so they knew what the reaction would look like, but we made predictions on what would happen now that we were adding in dish soap.

After we were done chatting, we added the vinegar, soap, and food coloring to the creature in the volcano. Next, the baking soda was poured in and the second eruption began. This eruption was so much more magnificent than the first! The “lava” was thick and slower moving, just like true lava, and it lasted for so much longer. Any time the lava slowed down too much, we simply added a little more vinegar and it picked up again. We initially predicted that the mixture would force the creature out of the volcano, but eventually, we had to fish him out of the volcano once the eruption was complete. We had a blast comparing and contrasting the two eruptions and the project was a ton of fun. It was a wonderful, hands-on way to explore chemical reactions and the majestic volcanoes we have recently become fascinated with.

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