Now That's My Kind Of Volcano

I have to admit that we don't always do the science experiments that K12 wants us to do in their lessons.  In fact, since I've been pregnant, a lot of the time I just read through the experiment with Alyssa.  "Okay, pretend we did this...and what do you think would happen?...Yeah, this and this would happen and we would learn..."

But today, we were learning how igneous rocks are formed, and when we went to the experiment page of the lesson, and I read ,"Melt 1/2 cup of chocolate chips..." I looked at Alyssa and said, "Meet me in the kitchen."

It was actually a pretty cool experiment.  Very simple and very cool.  We built our mountain out of a cup and some foil, melted our lava chocolate chips*, and then poured the lava down the mountain, now a volcano.  The point of the experiment was to illustrate that when it's in the earth, the lava is called "magma," then it's lava when it breaks through the crust, and when the lava cools, it hardens into igneous rock.  Right now our igneous rock is still hardening, and we're anxiously waiting to eat it.

*If you want to try this, the recipe for the lava is 1/2 c. melted chocolate chips mixed with 1 tsp. canola oil.  It made it the perfect consistency to flow down the mountain.  We doubled it so we can eat more chocolate.