Volcano Experiment

It seems like every kid makes a model volcano at some point during his/her childhood.  This week my daughter made her first volcano.  We didn't make the volcano base.  Students in my high school physics class made the base for something else and gave it to me.  Awesome students, I know!  Making a volcano is very easy.  Just do a Google search for "making a volcano" and you'll find several different options.  For the eruption itself I used the following website.

Science Bob's Volcano

We took a pill bottle and put in two spoonfuls of baking soda, a spoonful of dish soap, and a few drops of yellow and red food coloring to enhance the color of the eruption.  Then the bottle was placed in the volcano based, propped up by a board and several rocks to make it look more volcano-like.  Then we dumped in an 1/8 of a cup of vinegar and waited.  Our video is below.

You can see that the eruption happened, although it wasn't violent.  Afterwards we took a look in the pill bottle and I think the vinegar did not fully mix with most of the baking soda (see picture below).  

We need to experiment with this in the future to see if we can get a more impressive eruption.