Making Slime

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Sunday, 12 FEB 2006

A friend of mine bought for me for my birthday a book entitled 'The Mad Scientist Handbook'. This book is targeted for young people and has quite a few experiments in it for them to do. Some on their own and some with a little adult supervision. You can find this book available through Lindsay Books. You can get there by clicking the following link. www.lindsaybks.com

After reading the book, I decided this would be great fun to do with my children. My older children derive no fun from activities at all unless it has something to do with a TV and a Video Game. This is my attempt to try to intrest them in something that will feed the grey matter rather than turn it to jelly.

I let them look through the book to see what intrested them and thought we would try a few of these 'experiments' and see what came of them. Later I discovered that the book is available online from the authors website. If you are intrested in doing this experiment, you can find the details of it here. This link will open in a new window. This will open to the 'Green Slime' Experiment, but you should be aware that all the experiments in the book are available on his site. :-)

To start out with, this is my middle child. You know the type, fun loving, a little sneaky and marches to the beat of his own drum! Here he is with all the materials needed to make the slime. Making slime as it turns out only requires a few materials. What you see here are a couple of bowls to mix in, a measuring cup, measuring spoon, Elmers School Glue, some food coloring and some 20 Mule Team Borax.

To start out the recipe calls for 4 ounces of glue. Here you see Zachary carefully measuring out the glue.

Next, Zachary add 4 ounces of water to the glue. We decided that we would just keep the mixture in the measuring cup rather than dirtying up another bowl.

Next poor Zachary had to decide just what color he wanted his slime to be. Like most boys, it looks like green makes the coolest color for slime. Here he is adding 10 drops of green food coloring to the glue / water mix.

Here Zachary has mixed his glue / water / food coloring stuff up very thoroughly.

The next part of the recipe calls that we mix 1 cup of water with borax. Here Zachary is pouring his water into the mixing bowl.

And next he adds his 1 teaspoon of borax to the bowl. Just a note here, when you do this part, you may want to use warm water. Zachary was starting to gripe about how slow the borax was disolving in the water. Another thing to note is that changing the amount of borax changes how fast or slow the slime will ooze. The 1 teaspoon the author suggests turns out to be a good starting point.

With the borax finally disolved in the water, Zachary pours his glue mixture in the bowl with the borax and stirs it while doing so. The Glue mixture immediately coagualtes into some messy looking stuff. After the glue has all been poured into the borax water, you will need to go to the sink for the next part. Scoop the slime out of the water and kneed it into a ball. You will have lots of extra water in the bowl, I just discarded the water down the drain.

Here you see Zachary playing with his newly created slime while Michael looks on in awe of his brothers accomplishments.

Some Thoughts About Slime

This is some fun stuff. All the kids like playing with it. It is cheap to make, and easy to store in a zip lock bag. We made a second batch of slime using only 3/4 teaspoon of borax to see how it changed it. The second batch with Michael decided should be blue flowed more freely than the green batch. One last note: the water in the slime seems to evaporate with time. Michael played with his slime non stop for a couple of hours. By the time the slime went into the bag, it was about the consistancy of the original green slime we made.

If you are looking for something your children would like and is cheap to do, I would recommend this little project! But most of all, have fun with your child doing it!