Volcano Anyone?

Halló

That is 'Hello' in Icelandic

Why am I speaking to you in Icelandic (you may be wondering)?

Well, as it so happens, we have been interested and studying Volcanoes for the past few months, and as you probably heard, Eyjafjallajokull, is a volcano in Iceland that recently erupted.

We live in England, and were personally witnessing the impacts of the volcano in Iceland erupting. Though we did not experience any ash falling on us, all of the airports were shut down. We normally see many jet streams flying overhead in England (Heathrow is a busy airport!). It was a bit eery to see empty skies and to hear no noise for many days. I suppose we got a taste of what life was like pre airplanes. In the midst of all this, a dear friend introduced us, via email, to his friend in Iceland. The children and I got to email her many questions directly about the volcano, and also about life in Iceland. This is one of the many reasons we love home education that we now call 'Natural Learning'. One thing leads to another in a well rounded way, and not only are we getting real life experience and information about volcanoes, we also learned about Icelandic culture. AND, our new friend in Iceland even sent us a chokolate cake recipe that her mum has used for 60 years. Yummm, it was delicious after kiddo's baked it up and iced it.

In addition to real life eruptions, we trekked to the library to check out many books on volcanoes. I've truly enjoyed learning about the different types of lava, different types of eruptions, famous volcanoes and crater lakes we hope to visit one day.

To round out this experience, we HAD to get messy! So we grabbed some clay,

paint, newspaper and a beer bottle. (an empty one! to use as centre of our volcano). Up above is our Volcano model we made. The children had lots of fun painting it all green with lots of happy sheep grazing on the mountainside. Cypress kept telling me that after we erupted it we should paint grapes because grapes grow well on volcanoes (I've yet to verify this and no clue where she heard this).

Here's Take One of our Volcano Eruption

Here's a link to when we figured it out and made it explode.......

Take Two of our Volcano Eruption