This week we have been learning about volcanoes. As well as trying to remember they are found on the edges of the plates, we’ve been learning more new vocabulary – lava, magma, igneous rock.
First, we did the old faithful, making a volcano from playdough and making it erupt. We used baking powder, red food colouring (or food poisoning as one of the students insisted on calling it!) and weak sulphuric acid.
Sadly, I can’t put the pictures of the students setting them off, but you get the idea.
We then looked at lava cooling into igneous rock, using an experiment adapted from ‘Edible rocks‘. I melted the chocolate on silver foil over a beaker of water – it scares me a little how few of my Y10 students seem to have had the opportunity to use bunsen burners in the past – there’s some work for another day! I did try melting the chocolate in boiling tubes, but they ended up in the bin as we couldn’t get the chocolate out! T tells me I’m a ‘failure teacher’!
We used chocolate chips, but these did not cool down particularly quickly, so we had to do the ‘look, the chocolate has set, the rocks have gone hard, the lava has become igneous rock’ at the start of the following lesson.
speciallyteaching 
Reblogged this on SENBlogger.
LikeLike