The is a great activity to do with the kids, after all who doesn’t like to play with slime. Make it with white glue for opaque slime, or clear glue for translucent slime. Try experimenting by using different colours, adding sparkles, adding googgly eyes, or even orbeze to the slime (in step 2).
The science behind it: The glue contains an ingredient called polyvinyl acetate, which is a liquid polymer. The borax links the polyvinyl acetate molecules to each other, creating one large, flexible polymer. This kind of slime will get stiffer and more like putty the more you play with it.
Ingredients:
- 1.5 cups Water
- 1 tsp Borax
- 1 small bottle (4oz) Elmer’s Glue (school glue), White or clear. Different types of glue will produce different styles of slime (more stretchy, less stretchy more like jello, opaque or clear, etc)
- 1 stir stick (I like to use a wood popsicle stick that I can easily through away)
Direction:
- In a small bowl, mix 1 teaspoon of borax in 1 cup of water. Stir until the borax is mostly dissolved (it won’t all dissolve, thats ok).
- In a separate larger bowl, mix 1 small bottle (4 oz) white glue with 1/2 cup water. Add food coloring and/or sparkles or other interesting items, if desired. Stir until completely mixed.
- Pour the borax solution into the glue solution while stirring continuously. You will notice the slime beginning form immediately. Note: there is enough Borax in the solution to create all the polymer chain bonds, adding more Borax usually has little affect and will not readily dissolve in the slime.
- Try to mix it up as much as you can (The slime will become hard to stir, through away stir stick and get your hands dirty), don’t worry about any leftover water in the bowl; just pour it out (if you throw away the extra water you will get a firmer slime that is less sticky). Note: Continuously mixing in the leftover water solution will create a gooier / stickier slime, I prefer to separate the excess water and have a slime that does not stick to your hands (cleaner).
- Remove it from the bowl and finish mixing it by hand on the table. As you work it more, the slime will become stiffer and more like putty. Then you can shape it and mold it, though it will lose its shape over time.
- Store your slime in a sealed ziplock bag, preferably in the refrigerator.
- Don’t eat your slime and don’t leave it on surfaces that could be stained by the food coloring.
What Crazy Science is This?
Polymers are large, long molecules made up of many smaller molecules, or monomers, in a repeating chain. Elmer’s Glue All © is a type of linear polymer called “polyvinyl acetate”, which is made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
Borax (the special soap that is our second chemical) is a mineral, made of “sodium borate” monomers in a crystalline structure, which is ground into a powder.
Since both the borax and the glue are first mixed with water, when you combine the two, they interact through hydrogen (water) bonding. The glue and the borax mix together to create the slime, which is a matrix polymer, rather than a linear polymer (e.g. glue alone).
A linear polymer is like fresh cooked pasta: each noodle is separate from the other, and when you go to dump it out of the container, the pasta does not hold the container shape. A matrix polymer is like left over pasta: when you take it out of the container it has the shape of the container, with the noodles all stuck to each other.