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Volcano

Geography · Year 3–Year 6

A volcano cut in half, with the seven parts to name.

About the volcano

A volcano cut in half, erupting, with the seven words a volcanoes unit asks for: ash cloud, crater, vent, magma chamber, lava, the layers of ash and lava it is built of, and the crust it has pushed up through. Tap a part to name it and the board says what it does.

It is a cross-section because that is the only picture that answers the question. A photograph shows a mountain with smoke over it, and every word a class is asked for is inside it where nobody can see: the chamber, the vent and the layers are the tool.

The magma moves. Its dashes march up the vent and the lava's march down the side, so the board says which way each one is going without an arrow on it, and Stop holds them still for a quiet classroom. It stops on its own for anyone who has asked for no animation, and every word is still there.

The layers run parallel to the slope on purpose. What a class is being told is that the mountain is made of what came out of it, one eruption at a time, and layers drawn flat across the cone would say it was built out of the ground it stands on.

The plate boundary that put the volcano there is not on this board. It is the earthquake tool's subject, and the two are drawn from the same crust and mantle so a class sees the same ground twice rather than two pictures of it.

How to use it on your whiteboard

  1. 1Tap a part to name it and see what it does.
  2. 2Tap Next to work round the volcano from the top down.
  3. 3Tap Show all to put every label up at once, for reading rather than asking.
  4. 4Tap Stop to hold the magma still, and Hide to ask the class again.

Questions

What is the difference between magma and lava?
Where it is. Melted rock under the ground is magma; the same rock once it is out of the volcano is lava. That is the whole difference, and it is the thing most often muddled, so the board names them in two different places.
Why is the ash cloud drawn so big?
Because in a real eruption it is bigger. An ash cloud can go tens of kilometres up and stop aircraft flying across a continent, and a plume the size of a chimney's smoke would be teaching the wrong scale.
What are the layers?
Every eruption leaves ash and lava on the outside of the cone, so the mountain is built out of what has come out of it. That is why the layers run parallel to the slope, and why a volcano gets bigger over time.
Does it show what makes a volcano erupt?
It shows what erupts and where it comes from. Why the magma is there in the first place is about plates, which is the earthquake and mountain tools, and the page copy points at them.