To enable youth to gather their own materials when the activity begins, set up a “Slime Ingredient Table” with everything they’ll need.
(available on Amazon)įacilitator will need to prepare the following materials before the science activity. Once you’ve got youth hooked on snails, you can read Everything You Should Know About Snails by Anne Richards to provide some context for why slime is important in nature.
If you can find time to read a Newberry award chapter book to your group before you ever begin your Slime Challenge STEM activity, The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) by Avi is a wonderful chapter book about a snail and an ant and sets the stage for youth to begin to wonder about how a snail moves without legs. As the slime forms, the tangled molecule strands are much like the clump of spaghetti! Picture the difference between wet spaghetti and leftover spaghetti the next day. They begin to tangle and mix until the substance is less like the liquid you started with and thicker and rubbery like slime! Slime is a polymer. You add the borate ions to the mixture, and it then starts to connect these long strands together. These molecules with flow past one another keeping the glue in a liquid state. The glue is a polymer and is made up of long, repeating, and identical strands or molecules. The borate ions in the slime activators (sodium borate, borax powder, or boric acid) mix with the PVA (polyvinyl acetate) glue and forms this cool stretchy substance. How does slime work? Check out this simple explanation from the “Little Bins Little Hands” website! You’ll need to prepare a batch of slime before you begin with activity with youth and share your simple 3 ingredient slime recipe. Everyone loves slime! Mixtures, substances, polymers, states of matter, elasticity, and viscosity are just a few of the science concepts that can be explored with homemade slime.
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