Experiments with KVRR Meteorologist Scott Sincoff: Fluffy Slime
Fun, Easy, Kid-Friendly Science Experiments
MOORHEAD, Minn. — This week, Meteorologist Scott Sincoff creates Fluffy Slime with Concordia Science Academy Coordinator, Dr. Graeme Wyllie. The experiment was Fluffy Slime!
What You Need:
- Saline solution
- Glue
- Bowl
- Popsicle or mixing stick
- Shaving cream or foam
- Food coloring
How to Do the Experiment:
This experiment uses three simple household ingredients…we’re going to start off with white school glue. We’re gonna throw some of that in the bottom of the bowl, and the glue itself is a chemical called poly–vinyl alcohol. That’s going to react with the saline solution at the end of this experiment, but to make it fluffy, we’re going to add a bit of shaving cream.
The cool thing about this kind of science is that it’s all about varying your ingredients. If you use more shaving cream, you get a more fluffier slime. So it’s fun to play around with it.
But we don’t want our hands to be dyed every single color of the rainbow, so we’re going to add some food coloring, and we’re going to mix it with a special technique using a mixing stick. You can also use your hands, it’s up to you.
Add a few food color drops. The more you add, the darker and more colorful it’s going to get. Now, take your mixing stick and stir it all in together; and the way you can tell it’s actually mixing is that the mixture is going to be the same color all the way through. When the properties of a material are identical all the way through, the mixture is completely mixed. We call that in science, homogeneous. Everything is the same all the way through.
What we’re going to do next: the shaving foam is in the mixture for the fluffiness, and we’re going to take a drop of our saline solution which contains borax, and we’re going to squirt it in the bowl. It’s really a by feel thing, if you change your amounts of the ingredients, you change the properties of the mixture. At this point, you want to stir it really, really fast. As you do it, it’s going to fluff up and that’s when you add just a tad more shaving foam and mix it in again. If you get this right, you get something that’s almost marshmallow like in consistency. It also makes it very easy to lift up and get into a Ziploc bag to keep forever.
