Volcanoes

This post could also be titled "The ah-ha moment where I see how unschooling really does work." Oh, and if you think unschooling means unlearning or not educating think again and click on the above link for a plethora of definitions and explanations.

About a two weeks ago now my son asked me to tell him about volcanoes. I was able to put about a dozen sentences together about the topic to tell him about hot lava bursting out and cooling into rocks.

After him asking me to tell him again and again over the course of a few days we made a trip to the library last Monday where we picked out some volcano books. I now know more than I ever wanted to about volcanoes, and ash clouds, molten magma, pahoehoe (said pa-hoh-ee-hoh-ee) and 'a'a (said ah-ah) lava.

He knows more than I wanted too! One book has a section about Mt. Vesuvius. They cast the voids in the lava where the decomposed people were. Ah, yeah I didn't read that part, but he's a bit analytical and won't let me skip over any pages so he looked at the pictures and asked me, "what is that?" I said it was a concrete rock and he looked at me and said, "Mommy, it looks like someone dead." I just said "yeah, it does" while prying the page to turn it.

Long story short, he still can't get enough information about volcanoes and is just eating it up. It's really neat to teach them stuff when they want to learn it! One of the books had instructions to build our own volcano.

Of course we had to try it! What fun to teach him to gather the equipment and follow the steps of the experiment. It is more of a demonstration of the way an ash cloud works and it is proves it's point quite well. Just a bit of flour blown several times through out the day can cover an entire kitchen!