We are working on our geology unit and finding inspiration for projects from Barbara Taylor’s book Mountains and Volcanoes.
Today’s project is a layered earth using modeling beeswax by Stockmar. You can find this at A Child’s Dream.
You can see this in my recent homeschool haul.

We began by warming the wax in our hands; it was easy because the weather is warm. We rounded up a yellow ball to represent the inner core then wrapped the orange ‘outer core’ around it. We added the mantle in red-orange. We wrapped the whole thing in a thin layer of blue, topped each end with clear white to represent the poles and finally added the continents in green. The kids worked on this while I read aloud Journey to the Center of the Earth to them. I thought it was an appropriate companion to our geology unit.

We cut open our wax earth using a serrated knife the following day when the wax had cooled down. It had become deformed from resting on its side the whole day. Cutting it open was not as hard as I expected, and the reveal was pretty exciting.

Though our layers were grossly out of proportions, the demonstration was very valuable in understanding what’s inside our planet.

Please note that this is not a Waldorf project, even though we are using modeling beeswax.

Duration: 25 minutes
Cost: $5
Grades: all
Level: Easy