Typically, our older kids took on the job of
making our new volcanos. But since this year's group finally got through to me that they
preferred their messes at a distance, especially when it came to paper mâché, we opened up the process to their younger classmates, a group that, as a group, had yet to encounter a mess into which it didn't want to get up to their elbows.
Erupting the volcano was an ever-popular activity, one that always drew a crowd, and one that from a pedagogical point of view was a bit too much about me putting on a show for my taste. There were, of course, other times when the kids engaged in
free-form, hands-on baking soda and vinegar experiments, including
bomb making, but erupting the volcano had become a kind of performance that had taken on the trappings of a community ceremony, one that the children asked for, even demanded, on a regular basis, so in that way it was child-directed.
When I carried the volcano into
the outdoor classroom, children would begin to call out to one another, "The volcano! The volcano!" Most of them had already taken part in a handful of volcano ceremonies the year before, and the oldest kids had been part of dozens, so everyone knew what that cry meant. From every corner of the playground, children would descend to the work bench which served as the base for our volcano operations.
Even before I'd said anything, the kids would warn each other, "Don't put things in the volcano!" and "If you put things in there it won't work!" They knew this not from direct experience, but rather as a part of a "legend" I regularly repeated of a boy who stuffed a bunch of wood chips in there several years prior, clogging the vent, rendering the whole thing inoperable.
Ceremonially, I then would run through our volcano supplies, holding each item up as the children shouted out what they think it was: "Baking soda!" "Vinegar!" "Soap!" "Paint!" "Funnel!" "Chopstick!"
Most of them knew that we started by inserting the funnel into which I shook some baking soda, using the chopstick to push it through when it clumped up. Even if it didn't clump I had to use the chopstick because otherwise someone would demand, "What about poking it with the chopstick?" This is how anachronistic things become "necessary" parts of ceremonies, I suppose. This was followed by a healthy squirt of liquid dish soap, followed by a shot of orange or red liquid water color to give our lava a "realistic" hue.
"What's next?"
"Vinegar!" "Stand back!" "It's gonna erupt now!" "Be careful!"
Their cautious anticipation was entirely uncalled for and the more experienced ones knew it was all for show. The addition of the soap guarantees a slow-motion, long-lasting eruption, one that oozes from the vent rather than spurting out violently (when we want to experience
that kind of eruption we drop Mentos in a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke).
As the eruption became visible, the children would push their way up to its flanks, jostling, and griping at one another, crowding around, hands engaged in the flow of lava as it emerged from the vent and flowed down its sides. "It's erupting!" "Touch it!" "Don't get it in your eyes!" "It's dripping on the ground!"
Our volcanos typically had a lifespan of anywhere from a few months to a year. The way we knew it was time to make a new volcano was when the eruption became visible almost instantly. That told us that the 2-liter bottle that formed the chamber was nearly full of old baking soda. This is what we had observed during our most recent eruption, which is why we needed a new volcano.
There had been a time when I had fantasized about collecting all of our volcanos, adding a new one each year to our "mountain range," but with storage space at a premium, that idea, as cool as it would have been, had fallen by the wayside. I'd simply tossed a few older ones, but this time, I turned it over to the kids, telling them we needed to dismantle the old one, in order to build a new one. They made short order of it, leaving us with the wooden tray that we had been using as the base.
A new 2-liter soda bottle was positioned, then the idea was to create a kind of framework out of masking tape upon which we would build our paper mâché flanks. Usually, we did this with the older kids in a more systematic manner, so this process was a bit more chaotic than normal, with many of the children simply getting lost in the process of wrangling tape or using scissors. Archie's mom Natasha was the parent-teacher leading this process. It wasn't until she began to use the description "spider's web" that we arrived at a general understanding of our mission and while it took her hands to guarantee sufficient stability, a core group finally managed it.
Then we began the paper mâché process by tearing newspaper into strips. There are all kinds of pastes one can use, the "best" of which are cooked, but for our purposes, a thin white flour and water concoction worked just fine. We managed a full layer by the end of our first session, added a second layer a few days later, then finished it with a final layer of tissue paper which was left over from another art project. This step made painting unnecessary.
We had often, in the past, tried for a "rainbow volcano," always winding up with
preschool gray due to all those paint brushes mixing all those colors, but with the tissue paper technique we actually managed it.
The entire process took about two weeks. On the last day of school I brought it out to cries of, "The volcano! The volcano!" and we finished our year together with one more volcano ceremony.
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