Dino-mite Valentine Volcano!

I love the fact that my 3 year old gets to celebrate Valentine's Day this year with his preschool class. I knew I wanted to do something a little different than the normal card and candy. I found the cutest Valentine's idea nearly a year ago. I accidentally stumbled upon it again here about a month ago and knew it's what I wanted to help Santi make for his class (and very favorite neighbor). This is definitely one of those Valentine's crafts that you only make if you are super crafty, only have 1 child, or have children who nap, i.e. it takes time to put together! I am super excited with how everything turned out though!

Pretty much any time I make something new I have to do a test batch. Since this is a cool erupting volcano, obviously Santi was excited to help test!

The directions suggest adding small amounts of water at first, so we got a
small dropper, but that didn't last long!

The fun begins!

Then it got really good!!! I love how he got closer and closer the more the volcano erupted!

By the end he just dumped the rest of the water! I knew by this point we had a winner of a
Valentine's card/gift/idea!

Once I knew the volcano would work I got to work making 12 more volcanos, not hard, but monotonous. I readied everything I could about a week ago so that I wouldn't have to do everything last minute. I printed the cards and directions, Santi cut all the string, we got out all the bags we would need. Instead of buying bags I just used the bread bags that I have here on hand. Instead of cutting cling wrap I used zip lock bags and cut the tops off. I also had lots of left over bakers twine from Christmas that happens to be white and red, perfect! Santi was a huge help, most everything took longer, but he wanted to help as much as he could!

I wasn't really sure if I could mix all the ingredients a week in advance, so I waited until today to do that part. I'm glad I didn't wait until Friday morning, because it didn't go as smoothly as planned. I don't know if my soap isn't the same or if I did something wrong, but my baggies started erupting! That was one thing I hadn't thought of during my test run. When we mixed everything together we immediately tried out the volcano by adding water. After a quick trip to Kroger to buy more koolaid I decided to put a peice of foil between the soap and dry ingredients so they won't mix until the water is added.

First attempt at adding all the ingredients together, FAIL!

Second attempt with foil, WIN!

Santi worked very hard writing his name 12 times, that's a lot for a 3 year old!!
I was very proud of him and may or may not have bribed him with M&M's.

I think they turned out pretty fantastic! And if the kids have half as much fun making their own
volcanos as Santi did, then it was worth it!

Happy Valentine's Day!!