Homeschool Dairies - Making Slime after Slime
The last two weeks we have been mixing up batch after batch of clear glitter glue slime, and white glue slime with acrylic paint as the colorant. Connor has been incredibly persistent in making slime and learning what recipe works best.
In the process, I have learned the same thing. A recipe is very important when it comes to slime and depending on the glue you use as well. I searched so many slime recipes and videos and so many were different.
We used white glue with baking soda and paint and contact eye solution. This actually works for both types of glue, which is awesome. You need glue, you need baking soda and you need a possible food coloring or paint as we used.
Connor really wanted black slime, and he was hoping to make a huge bubble to fit himself in (thank you YouTube for this idea ?) however we did not make enough slime or get the right consistency for it, mainly because we were adding too much eye solution.
We have now learned that the baking soda and eye contact solution continue to process after you have mixed it so adding the eye solution very slowly and allowing your slime to be sticky is the best way.1 bottle of glue (white or clear or glitter which equals to about 1 1/2 cups)3 tsp baking soda1 Tbsp of Contact eye solution (this amount will vary you must go little by little. I found I sprayed enough to be about 1tbsp in total. The tip was to add more baking soda not eye solution as the amount of borax varies from brand to brand)Side note. If you are using a borax solution, be careful what that is because I found that we could never reach a perfect balance of warm water, to borax and come out with good slime. But we have three impatient kids awaiting slime and this borax measurement task is just not something I will be doing again. If you have the perfect recipe please share with us! If not, skip it and get the eye solution.
We use Bausch + Lomb sensitive eyes and it's the most cost-effective one out there.
The kids learned a few things this week while making slime:
- practice makes perfect
- it is ok to make mistakes
- learning from our mistakes is really great
- it is fun to play with any version of slime, even the ones that go very wrong
- Baking soda is a very important ingredient for slime
- Too much borax makes the slime break
- To keep trying and not give up
We did have a few bad batches, and they both were very opposite from one another. (I also do not have photos of these) They did still break easily but the first bad batch was a huge batch of white glue and too much borax and water. It looked like brains or guts. We called it brain-guts. It was pink to boot.The second batch that we made was with two bottles of clear glue and too much borax in the water solution. It created something that was out of this world. It looked like ice. It was smooth to the touch and bouncy! But it would crack and break so easily and made a huge (fun) mess everywhere. The bad batches still had their elements of fun and they were very interesting.
What I learned from making slime with my kids
- That I need to loosen up a lot! I worry so much about things and keeping things clean that I do forget to just have fun. Hence the second on this list;
- To just let the kids make a mess and do it wrong. This is so hard for me to do but I'm working on it!
- We can always learn something from the experience and the experiment we are doing.
And that's a wrap guys! We love slime and will most definitely be making more in the future. I can't wait to see what YouTube inspires my kids to try next. (Hopefully, it's not too ? crazy)Till next time,Breath deeply and create your masterpiece,Alexandra