You Will Need:
- Plastic cups x2
- One marker pen
- One tablespoon
- One teaspoon
- 100g of cornflour
- 100g of Borax
- 100mL of PVA glue (we have found that Elmer’s Glue works best)
- 100mL of hot water
- Food Colouring
- Adult help
Using the maker pen, label one of the plastic cups “Borax Mixture” and the other “Ball Mixture.
Put two tablespoons of hot water and half a teaspoon of borax into the cup labelled “Borax Mixture.” Add a couple of drops of food colouring and stir until all the borax has dissolved.
Add one tablespoon of PVA glue into the cup labelled “Ball Mixture.”
Add half a teaspoon of the “Borax Mixture” and one tablespoon of cornflour into the cup Labelled “Ball Mixture.”
Leave the ingredients to sit for about 15 seconds.
Using a spoon, thoroughly stir the material in the cup labelled “ball mixture.”
Once the mixture is too thick to stir, scoop it out and roll it in your hands. At first it will be sticky and messy, but as you knead it will become easier to work with.
You may need to experiment with different amounts of cornflour as the glue recipes can change over time (and different brands have different amounts of each ingredient in them).
After a few minutes, drop your polymer ball onto a table.
If it does not bounce, keep kneading it.
Get the Unit of Work on States of Matter here!
- What are the different states of matter?
- How does heat affect the size of materials?
- How does liquid nitrogen affect materials and much more!
Includes cross-curricular teaching ideas, student quizzes, a sample marking rubric, scope & sequences & more
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Why Does This Happen?
The PVA in PVA Glue stands for Poly-Vinyl Alcohol. It’s a special sort of chemical called a polymer. The “Poly” part of PVA means many, because PVA is made of lots and lots of units added together into big long chains. Usually they chains slip and slide past each other, and we get a flowing liquid.
Borax is a chemical that we usually use for cleaning, but it has another interesting property. When it’s mixed with Poly-Vinyl Alcohol, it grabs those long chains of polymer, and links them together (leaving water behind as a by-product). Now, the properties of the PVA change: instead of slip-sliding past each other, the PVA-borax mixture stretches and clumps together into a kind of slime.
By adding cornflour to the PVA and Borax mixture you now have a material which becomes harder when you give it more pressure… a non-Newtonian solid combined with an elastic slime! This means that when you bounce the ball it can then transfer the forces back into the floor more easily and the ball bounces easily. You can also make cornflour slime which takes advantage of non-Newtonian solid properties.
Variables to test
- Vary the amount of PVA glue that you use
- Vary the amount of borax that you use.
- Try warm vs. cold ingredients
From colour changes to slimy science, we’ve got your kitchen chemistry covered!
Get in touch with FizzicsEd to find out how we can work with your class.
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Years 3 to 6
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Nice
Glad you liked it!
Loved it! We did it in our school science club. My friend and I made a pink one. It was so fun 🙂
Awesome!