We've been mostly living outdoors, with lots of water play and a barbecue. A bucket of water and a paintbrush has been popular for 'painting' the shed and of course the obligatory sandpit and paddling pool.
I've been wanting to do the volcano experiment for months, but as Harlan has shown a recent interest in dinosaurs (and playing Mario levels with lava that burns Mario's bottom!) I thought it might be a good time to give it a try. We used half an empty squash bottle as the centre of the volcano and built up saltdough (salt, flour, water) around it to form the volcano shape. Ideally we would have let the saltdough dry in the sun but that takes too long so we accepted the volcano would disintegrate and got on with the messy fun. Harlan poured bicarbonate of soda into the plastic bottle and put red food dye in to make our lava the right colour. He then poured in vinegar (ours was malt vinegar but any type would work, whatever you happen to have in the cupboard) and was delighted when foamy 'lava' poured out of the volcano. We repeated it until we ran out of ingredients and I am under strict instructions to buy more so we can do it again. We might make a papier mache volcano next time I think and add dinosaurs around the base, as he thought it was great to pretend to be a dinosaur running away from the lava so he didn't melt.
I really recommend this experiment as it uses ingredients you probably have in your kitchen cupboard or are cheap to buy and it was a lot of fun.
Harlan ended the afternoon by making his own tea, poking linguini through hot dog sausages. It's something I saw on Pinterest a while back and never got round to doing. Under supervision, he prepared it all, watched it cook, talked about how the spaghetti was changing when it cooked, decide when it was done and scoop it out onto his plate with a slotted spoon. Job well done!
Love the volcano experiment, looks like yours turned out well :D
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