Chemical experience - Vesuvius on the table

How to conduct an entertaining lesson in chemistry in the kitchen and make it safe and interesting for your child? Let's try to conduct a real chemical experiment - a volcano in a regular dining room plate. For this experience, the following materials and reagents will be required:

- A piece of plasticine (from it we will make the volcano itself);

- a plate;

- acetic acid;

- baking soda;

- dishwashing liquid;

Dye.

The above components can easily be found in every house or in the economic department of a nearby store. They are quite safe, but, like any experiments in chemistry, this one will also require compliance with safety regulations.

Description of work:

1. From the plasticine we make the base of the volcano and the cone with the hole. We connect them, carefully closing the edges. We get a plasticine mock-up of the volcano with slopes. The internal size of our design should have a circle with a diameter of about 100 - 200 mm. Before installing the model in a plate or tray we check our volcano for leaks: we draw water into it and see if it passes it. If everything is in order - we set the breadboard model of the volcano in a plate.
2. Now go to the next part - the preparation of lava. We fall asleep in our model of a plasticine volcano, one tablespoon of drinking soda, a dishwashing liquid in the same volume and a dye that will color the future eruption in the corresponding color of the real lava. To achieve maximum similarity, you can use food colorings, children's paints for drawing and even ordinary juice of beetroot. This chemical experience should recreate in the eyes of the child the volcanic eruption in nature.
3. To start the eruption, you need to pour a fourth of a cup of vinegar into the crater. In the course of a chemical reaction, a compound of sodium and acetic acid leads to the formation of a salt of carbonic acid, which belongs to unstable compounds and immediately decomposes into water and carbon dioxide. It is this frothy process that will give our eruption the appearance of a real volcano with lava flows down the slopes. The chemical experience is over.

Demonstration of an active volcano in the school

In addition to the above described type of demonstration of a safe eruption, there are many more ways to get a volcano on the table. But it is better to conduct these experiments in specially prepared premises - school chemical laboratories. The most famous volcano from school Böttger. To conduct it, you need ammonium dichromate, which is poured into the hill, and a depression is made at the top. In the crater, place a piece of cotton wool soaked with alcohol, which is ignited. During the reaction, nitrogen, water and chromium oxide are formed. The current reaction is very similar to the eruption of an active volcano.

For remembering, as well as for the development of erudition in children, it is good to associate such chemical experience with some of the most famous examples of eruptions in the history of human civilization, for example, with the explosion of Vesuvius in Italy, especially as it can be illustrated with great and useful horizons by a reproduction of the great Paintings by Karl Bryullov "The Last Day of Pompeii" (1827-1833).

Interesting for children will also be a story about the rather rare and useful profession of a volcanologist. These specialists constantly observe already extinct and current volcanoes, make assumptions about the possible time and strength of their future eruptions.