"this is the day,

this is the day,

that the lord has made

that the lord had made

i will rejoice

i will rejoice

and be glad in it

and be glad in it"

i had to sing this to myself this morning. you see I'm not a morning person, I'm really not a night owl anymore either. i like to sleep to much :) BUT my children, especially Raelyn, seems to be getting up earlier and earlier each morning. this isn't a huge problem, but she insists on waking everyone else up really early with her. so both Rae and Brenna were up before 6 this morning. this made me very grumpy to say the least.... so i needed to get myself out of a bad mood and give myself a restart... ever have those mornings? they are probably a once a week occurrence here at our house. But the song did help! i should be giving thanks for the new day and that my kids are healthy enough to get up and be happy in the mornings.

so now on to Volcanos :)

the kids worked together to make a volcano at Raelyns 6th birthday party... to see the other things we did click here and here.

to make the volcano you will need:

1 plastic water or soda bottle

tin foil

a pan to put it in

play dough to form your volcano

gravel, dried peas, and cut branches for decoration

what we did:

1. i set the bottle in some of the play dough in the middle of the pan

2. then used to tin foil to make the shape of the volcano

3. then we gave each of the kids some play dough to form around the tin foil to make it look more realistic

4. after they worked on the volcano part, i gave them black gravel (from the pet department) and a bag of dried peas to use to make the surroundings of the volcano.

5. i had gone out in our back yard a little earlier and cut some small branches off of our bushes and they used them like trees to decorate.

- it really looked cool. they did a great job all working together.

then we ERUPTED the volcano! they loved this part!

what you need:

1/2 cup of water

vinegar

1/4 cup of baking soda

couple of drops of red food coloring (if you don't do enough drops, it might turn out pink, our lava was a little on the pink side)

3 drops of dish soap

what you do:

1. add the food coloring and dish soap to the water and then pour into the bottle

2. add the baking soda in the bottle

3. start slowly pouring the vinegar into the bottle

4. sit back and watch :)

we did this over and over because they loved it so much, we just kept adding a little baking soda and then vinegar in the bottle.

this is great for explaining a chemical reaction for a science lesson... click here to see how else we have experimented with chemical reactions.