Slime Puppets

                                

We always have some sort of slime, gak or flubber around this house. The kids were playing with it the other day with google eyes....... 

Slime + Google Eyes = Puppet Show?

Worked for them!  Nice easy entertainment. 

Making Flavored Ice Cubes

A few weeks ago we made some flavored ice cubes.  My son started out with a few different flavors of Kool Aid and added sugar to make it sweet.  He poured the different flavored Kool Aid into ice cube trays and abracadabra flavored ice.  We added it to seltzer and water to create delicious, pretty drinks with much less sugar than soda or a full cup of Kool Aid.  The kids loved adding a variety of flavors to create their own "specialty drinks".   

We also landed up making flavored ice cubes with straight lemon juice and lime juice.  These were also delicious to create a refreshing lemon and/or lime drink with no sugar.  

If you ask my son, he had the most fun mixing up all the different colors of Kool Aid into one pitcher - see the resulting brown Kool Aid?

How High Can You Go?

Try out this challenge... how high can you stack layers of small plastic cups and cardboard and balance on it without crushing it all?  In our house, the 50 pound child was able to stack 4 layers of cups and cardboard and balance on it without breaking the tower down.


This was a great project to explain weight distribution and it was just plain fun!

Colorful Slime

I have seen many recipes for slime on the internet and in books so we figured we would try it out.  This was so simple and fun.  Just combine equal parts clear glue and liquid starch (found in the laundry aisle at grocery store).  Mix them together.  Then separate the slime and add food coloring to each smaller batch.  We only used one food coloring drop per small batch. 

We used our hands to mix in the food coloring and then it was squish time.  The children enjoyed squishing the slime through their fingers and trying to mix up the colors.  The longer you mix it together the thicker it gets.

This was a fun project to do that was a different consistency than gak, flubber and play dough.  

Water Bottle Run

We created a fun water bottle run on the refrigerator yesterday.  First cut the bottoms off of water bottles (adult job).  Then duct tape magnets onto the bottles.  We taped the magnets on so we can reuse them another time.  Arrange the bottles in order so that objects can fall through all the way to the bottom.  This was the fun of it - trying different objects to see what would work best.  We determined that pom pom balls worked the best along with small tin foil balls.  Marbles were too heavy and would knock the water bottles off.  Also, roll away (and under the fridge) if you missed the last cup.  The pom-pom's don't roll anywhere.  

Don't forget that for the last bottle, cut the top off of instead of the bottom to catch the pom-poms. 
We did try pouring water down the bottle run and it does work fine.  Just pour very slow and small amounts.  May want to put a towel on the floor though - you know kids and water nothing stays dry for long.

This activity encourages:

• creativity
• exploration
• science fun

Visit www.GrowingPlay.com for more fun activity ideas.

Glow in the Dark Slime

After seeing this activity on Pinterest, we decided we had to try it ourselves.   We have made slime before (we actually call it Flubber) but never glow in the dark.

Step 1:  Mix one cup Borax with some water in a large jar.  We shook the jar for 10 minutes to mix it up (taking turns obviously).

Step 2:  In another plastic cup, they mixed together 50% glue with 50% water and 2 tbsp glow in the dark paint.  They stirred this up with a popsicle stick.  Then it was time to add the Borax solution.

Step 3:  They slowly poured the Borax solution into the glue/water/paint mixture while stirring.  It quickly adhered to the popsicle stick and started to become a solid. 

Step 4:  They took it out of the cup and kneaded in their hands for awhile.  As soon as it was ready we ran to the closet (which is our go to place to check glow in the dark anything).  IT WORKED!!  It really glowed.  Have to admit once I was in the closet I did wonder why we wanted to make it glow so bad.  We could not use the slime in the closet but it was still cool.  Plus, I can not imagine myself at night, when dark out, saying "time to make some glow in the dark slime right before bed kids".  Regardless, the slime itself was hours of fun out of the dark closet. 

Here is the finished product.  They started using tools with it but I did not take pictures - scissors, cookie cutters and sandwich makers.  The slime held up very well.