Polymers and Glow in the Dark Slime

We had an impromtu science lesson today thanks to Aurora. My daughter really liked this as it was messy, my son liked it because it looked so good under his black light at the end... I knew we'd find a use for that thing one day :o)

First you had to open up a high-lighter pen and run cold water on it catching the liquid in a cup.

Then mix the liquid with the glue and borax and give it a good stir.

We used white glue here because I'm a cheap skate and wouldn't use any new clear glue until we'd used up the old stuff :o)

The white PVA glue didn't work very well,(sort of ended up with a bouncy ball) so we did another batch and used the clear glue which worked really well and we ended up with flourescent slime.

This is it under the black light, quite impressive.Below are pics of cornstarch and water mixed together to show how polymers act (as a solid when pushed together and as a liquid when left to run down your hand).

This had my son engrossed for quite a while.

The best bit about the class was that everything was explained as you went along so there were no tricky questions that I couldn't answer, phew!