Volcanic mountains are formed by magma rising up from the mantle to the crust of the earth.

A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases escape from a magma chamber below the surface.

Earth’s volcanoes occur because its crust is broken into 17 major, rigid tectonic plates that float on a hotter, softer layer in its mantle.

Therefore, on Earth, volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging, and most are found underwater.

Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the crust’s plates. For this activity, we created volcanoes out of a few materials.

Using blue gravel, wet sand, baking soda, gravel, and vinegar, we created out very own volcanoes, and then watched them erupt!

The tactile experience (touching a letter with your finger) is important for building a memory trace.

This enables students to acquaint the name of each letter with a visual representation for the letter sound. For a child who is struggling with their letters, the sooner they can integrate the sound of the letter with what it looks like, the sooner their writing contains more meaning for them.

For this activity, we talked about the letters in the word ROCK, particularly the letter R. Throughout the week, your little one has learned how mountains are made up of rocks, so we focused many of our circle times and writing activities around this word.

Using clay, and rocks, students composed Rs out of clay and then placed rocks into them.  Upon finishing, we admired the many wonderful Rs that we created!

Creative art activities can help children in all areas of development. The first of these involve your little one’s large and small muscle development, as well as their eye-hand coordination.

Using crayons, markers, and paint brushes helps children practice the fine motor control they will need for writing later on. The second, involves social development.

When children work together in the art area, they learn to share, to interact with others, to be responsible for cleanup, and to put materials away.

These are positive and important changes for social learning. The third domain includes cognitive development.

Young children can learn the names of colors and shapes through creative art activities.

They find out what happens when they mix various shapes together to get a final product.

For this creative art activity, we used brown paint, cup holders, toothpicks, tree cut-outs and our thinking minds to create our very own alpine forest!