Once the ball was formed, it was ready to bouncy. Although it didn’t bouncy nearly as high as the super bouncy balls she was familiar with, my daughter still had a ton of fun throwing it around the house. It does and you can use slime making to explore states of matter and its interactions. Find out more below… Note: If let to sit, the ball will become flat on one side. Simply rolling it between your hands should make it round again. The measurements are a little forgiving so we found it easiest to use a 1/4 cup measuring cup filling it halfway with glue (2 T) before adding the 1 T of cornstarch. Using a measuring spoon to measure the glue turned out to be more messy than estimating the 2T of glue in the 1/4 cup wearing cup.

What’s slime science all about? 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. This is called cross-linking! This product will support your students' understanding of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)*, as shown in the table below. Now my daughter was ready for the fun and gooey part. She poured her glue mixture into the borax water and let it sit for about 10-15 seconds. The glue mixture started to harden and could be removed easily with a fork. Students can use the Bouncing Ball Class Kit to plan and conduct an investigation to describe and classify different kinds of materials by their observable properties. The first step to making the bouncy balls was to prepare the borax and water mixture. My 5 year old daughter measured out 1/2 cup of warm water and 1 T of borax. Then she gave the mixture a good stir to dissolve the borax.

CHECK OUT MORE FUN IDEAS TO TRY

To make your own borax bouncy balls you will use a variation of our Borax Slime recipe. Where do I buy borax powder?

Using the Bouncing Ball Class Kit, students can develop models to describe the atomic composition of simple molecules and their structures or properties. When the glue mixture was added to the borax, the borax acted as a cross-linker, hooking the glue’s molecules together to form the rubbery bouncy ball. Make sure to wash your hands after making and playing with your bouncy balls. Wash all surfaces too! See slime safety notes here. The ball can bounce because of the cross-linked polymers. Since the long polymer chains are flexible, when the ball hits the ground, it is able to momentarily deform or squish.STEP 4: Time to dig in with your hands. Begin kneading one of the glue mixture globs, working with one blob at a time. Then she added a couple drops of food coloring to the glue/cornstarch mixture and gave it a little stir. She was hoping to get a swirled bouncy ball but it turns out the food color really gets mixed thoroughly when forming the ball. The glue is a polymer and is made up of long, repeating, and identical strands or molecules. These molecules with flow past one another keeping the glue in a liquid state. Until… Polymers, long strands of molecules, behave in a similar way as the long strands of spaghetti. If the long molecules slide past each other, the substance acts like a liquid (like the liquid glue). Using the Bouncing Ball Class Kit, students can investigate, gather and make sense of information about synthetic materials.