Our version of a Venus volcano

Sweet-Pea had to create lava today! No not real lava! We are using the Apologia Exploring Creation with Astronomy book, and are currently studying lesson 4 - Venus. If you don't know about these science books, I highly recommend them. There are 5 books in all (so far), all written by Jeannie Fulbright. As a supplement, we are creating a lapbook to go along with it which I found here. I will post photos of it when we are done with the first one (there are 2 for the whole book). If you enjoy scrapbooking like I do, then you'll enjoy lapbooking. It really adds to the learning experience, plus your kids will have fun creating them!

Anyhow, Venus is covered with volcanoes, so we are learning about lava and what it's made of. Our volcano experiment begain with a stick of butter. They said to use 1/4 stick, but we used a whole one...the more lava the better!!



As the butter was melting, we put together our base. A large plate and a dish to go in the center. They suggested a custard dish...we used a small white crock...it was as close to a custard dish as we could find.



Sweet-Pea then put flour all around the dish creating a mountain. We put some on the top as well so it blended together.





Once that was done, I slowly poured the melted butter onto the top center of the 'custard' dish, allowing it to flow down the sides. This is to show how lava would flow down the sides of the mountain...creating streams and paths. It really flowed slowly like lava would too...pretty amazing.



After a while, we will go back and look at it once again to see what happened with the 'molten lava' (a.k.a. melted butter). Sweet-Pea guessed correctly what would happen...as it cools down, the lava would become hard rock again...since lava is simply melted rock. In our case, it will become hardened butter again.

It's a pretty simple experiment, but it shows how lava runs down and cools. Venus has nothing to melt, so it's pretty much all melted rock with some hard rocky spots from cooling...not sure how since they say it's over 870 degrees on the planet! Wow...and I thought the heat and humidity this past summer was unbearable!

This video shows how Sweet-Pea figured it out. Sorry about the pajamas, unkempt hair and our horrible voices...I sound like a man with my scratchy voice...gag! We're all fighting colds and sore throats, but we're doing school anyhow.



Well, we're off to finish the rest of our classes. Have a great day everyone!