I am in 6th grade and need to do a project on volcanoes or
earthquakes and want to do something more interesting than a baking soda and
vinegar volcano. Do you have any ideas for projects or other places I
might find them?
Christy
Hi Christy,
Let's see, how much of a mess do you want to make? One of my favorite
volcano projects is to make clay lava flows. You mix a bunch of ceramic
clay with water until it has the consistency of cake batter (some people
actually use cake batter), and then you pour it down an inclined plane.
You can study all kinds of variations. You can change the percentage of
water, you can change the slope of the plane, you can change how fast you
pour the stuff out onto the plane, etc. You can very easily make
drawings of the final shapes of your lava flow and you can make diagrams
of the cross sections of the flow anywhere along its length by cutting it
with a thin piece of plastic like a ruler.
Another thing you could do would be to xerox all the photos of volcanoes you
can find and try to classify them into groups. Some might be big, some
might be small, some might be steep, others more gradual, etc. Try to
see if there are patterns that start to show up (for example, are all the
steep ones in Central America? Are all the big ones in Indonesia?).
There are also a few education materials in the Mount Saint Helens
section of VolcanoWorld.
I hope this has been at least a little bit of help for you.
Good luck with your project!
Sincerely,
Scott Rowland
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