My Mouth Is A Volcano!

We all love the book My Mouth Is a Volcano by Julia Cook! (She's one of my favorite children's authors!) This year, I bought the book for only $6 on Amazon. SO WORTH IT! I LOVE to make learning fun... so of course, we had to make it happen! Instead of just reading the book, talking about it and moving on with our day, I decided to make this more interesting! We made our own volcanos!!! Yes. Volcanos! All the supplies were roughly under $5, so if you're interested in making this lesson a little more creative and memorable keep reading!

Now, if you aren't familiar with what this book is about, it is about blurting out when others are talking or rather "erupting", so it's PERFECT for the beginning of the year! If you don't have the book you can YouTube a great read aloud of it!

Preparation: Of course you have to prep. Here is what you need: small bottles, orange food dye, baking soda, vinegar, and tin baking pans. You can always adjust based on what you have already! Lucky for me I found these super tiny soda bottles down the ethnic food isle at Walmart for .25 cents each, so I grabbed 5 (one per group). I added red and yellow food dye into my vinegar so that when you pour it into the bottle later on the bubbles come out orange like lava! I emptied the tiny

soda bottle and rinsed them out, let them dry and then proceeded to spray paint them brown. Once they are dry I added baking soda. You only need a little bit, but i suggest that you experiment the night before at your house so you can get an idea of the ration of vinegar and baking soda. I used the tin baking pans to basically hold the "volcanoes" so that when they erupted something would be there to catch the liquid. They were .88 cents for 3 but if you have something already feel free to use that and save money!

We started off talking about what "blurting out" really was and gave examples as a class. The day before I made an anchor chart of a giant volcano and laminated it so I could use it every year! Once you laminate it, you can either use dry erase marker on it to write student responses, write them on sticky notes (what I did) or if you have an older crew you can have them write on the sticky notes and place them on the chart. Having the students contribute to the anchor chart is HUGE! They have to feel like they are a part of creating it if you want the overall effects of the lesson to work in the long run.

Once the students have done the experiment, have the students write something! This is always a great way for them to conclude their thoughts! There are so many great things on Teacherspayteachers too, or you can simply just have them pull out a journal to write their findings!