We made a fun volcano out of homemade playdough, a bottle, and some red hot lava. Okay, it may not have been hot lava, but those towns people didn’t know what hit’em! They were soaked in colored baking soda and vinegar, it might as well have been hot lava!

Supplies for Homemade Playdough Volcano:

• playdough – easy playdough recipe
• empty plastic bottle
• tray with edges, lined with tinfoil
• baking soda & funnel
• white vinegar & red food coloring (optional)
• plastic toys (optional)

1. First prep your playdough. You could use pre-made playdoughs or even baking clay, but we just used this great recipe I’ve shared for homemade playdough. I added all 4 of the food coloring colors to help give it this brown/gray look. Since we were not going to save this forever, I decided that this type of playdough volcano was perfect for our creation. If you want to save this, you may want to consider a clay that can be baked.

2. Mold your soft playdough all around your bottle, trying not to leave any holes. Leave the top open for pouring. Let this playdough harden overnight. Our playdough didn’t end up cracking, but there is a chance that it might after it’s hard. Maybe that will just add to the effects though.

3. Once your playdough is hardened, you can leave your volcano bare, or place a fun scenery around the tray. We have a giant kitty, lego towns people, a few dinosaurs, and a princess. They are in for a treat!

4. fill the bottle with 1/3 cup baking soda. I used a funnel to help get the baking soda into the hole.

5. For a fun red look, put several drops of red food coloring into your white vinegar and swish it around.

6. Once your baking soda is in the bottle, you can pour your vinegar into the volcano. There is no real set amount of vinegar you use. It needs to be enough to fill up the bottle to allow the baking soda to bubble up and over. We ended up using almost all of our vinegar along with our 1/3 cup of the baking soda, as we watched it again and again.

Watch our fun video to see how our volcano erupted!

We had so much fun with this volcano, making it erupt over and over. All of us, maybe not the princess and big kitty, were having a blast!