Volcanoes and Dancing Raisins

My 3 year old is obsessed with volcanoes.

A few months ago we had done baking soda and vinegar volcanoes and I was looking through those pictures at the huge smile on his face and I knew we needed to do it again!
This time we took it up a notch and we ended up playing with this for almost an hour.

When we first started out we were planning on just making some volcanic eruptions.

I grabbed the baking soda, vinegar, measuring cup, cup, and glass pan.

I tried to make this as simple as possible and just find things I had on hand.

It was also snowing like crazy outside, so we needed to make this mess as little as possible for indoor use, so I put the cup in glass pan, to catch the overflow.

I had my son pour two spoonfuls of baking soda into the bottom of the cup.

 I then measured out 1/3 c. of vinegar in the liquid measuring cup.
We found that to be our best ratio.

 and I let him pour it in.

Of course there were huge smiles and laughs right away!
We actually then added a little more vinegar and it caused a second eruption.
We wanted to try some different experiments, so I then added a drop of liquid food coloring to the liquid measuring cup and then poured in some vinegar.

Again, huge smiles and laughs :)

Years ago I had seen an idea for 'dancing raisins' where the person put raisins in a cup with pop (soda, soda pop, whatever name you prefer), and the carbonation made the raisins float up to the top.

I was curious to see if this would work with our baking soda/vinegar mixture because I was just watching bubbles continuously float up from the bottom of the cup.

I handed my son a container of raisins and let him drop them in one by one.

It worked!

The raisins floated to the top, went back down, and floated back up again.

Over and over and over.

I was then curious to see which worked better at making the raisins 'dance', the pop or the baking soda/vinegar mixture.

The clearest pop I had on hand was Diet Mountain Dew, so I poured some in a glass cup and handed my son some more raisins.

They started reacted the same way as the ones in the baking soda/vinegar mixture, but only for a few minutes.

After that they didn't float anymore.

The raisins in the baking soda/vinegar mixture continued 'dancing' for a good 20 minutes or so.
It was pretty entertaining!

My son then kind of just started doing his own thing and scooped raisins back and forth between the cups.

At one point he poured the pop and the baking soda/vinegar mixture together in the glass pan and scooped raisins in and out of that.

Like I said, entertainment for almost an hour!

Can't go wrong with that on a cold snowy day!