Making slime with glue

Here's how to make a handful of slime with a group of small kids, while explaining that sometimes science looks like magic but you can explain the effects.

Materials

Per student:

• 10cc of glue (experience has taught us that transparent kidsglue from Action or opaque knutsellijm from Pipoos work best, see https://twitter.com/aliekens/status/762273574363201536)
• 10cc of water
• 1 cup
• fork (or other stirring tool)

Common:

• Bowl with tepid water
• 10cc of powdered Borax
• Food coloring
• Glitters

Steps

Prep: How does it work?

Explain how glue works: on the molecular level glue consists of many short polymers. These polymers are sticky and can connect two surfaces.

Glue is similar to a big pile of tiny steel chains. If you grab one, you're only gonna take out the short chain.

Now imagine throwing a bunch of molecular magnets in this pile of little chains. If you pull out one, you will also pull out a bunch of other chains, in a very slimy manner.

The borax works in a simialr manner as the magnets, it connects the short polymers together to form longer polymers, resulting in the slimy end result of this workshop.

Hands on: let's make this!

Each kid first creates their own mix of ingredients:

• Put 10cc of glue in the cup
• Add 10cc of water to the cup
• Stir to create a glue/water mixture
• Optionally, add a few drops of food coloring and glitters, by choice

Prepare a water-borax mixture:

• Prepare a bowl with tepid water (make sure it's not too hot for the kids' hands!)
• Add 10cc of borax
• Mix well until the borax crystals are dissolved in the water

Time for slime!

• Each kid takes turns to turn her glue mixture into slime
• Dump the contents of the cup into the bowl with borax, the glue immediately turns into slime!
• Each kid grabs and pulls their slime back out the borax mixture, back in to their cup
• Playtime!