Borax Slime

Nothing can make a boring day more fun than the feeling of slime oozing through your fingers. Is it a liquid or a solid? Better play some more to find out! Let’s make borax slime.

What You Will Need

– white wood glue
– borax powder (look in the laundry detergent isle of the grocery store)
– food coloring
– water
– measuring spoon
– two work containers
– airtight containers for storing your slime.

What You’ll Do

Put one tablespoon of glue and one tablespoon of water in your container and mix it with a tiny amount of food coloring. Stir the whole mixture together. In a separate container mix one tablespoon of borax with one tablespoon of water. Stir them together until the borax solution dissolves.

Next, pour the borax solution into the other container and mix it with the colored glue mixture. Mix them together, preferably with your hands because it’s more fun! Soon your slime with form.

After you are through playing with your slime, be sure to store it in an airtight container to prevent mold. Watch this video

What is Going On?

Slime is a viscous liquid, which means it has characteristics of both a solid and a liquid- making it very fun to play with! The slime in our experiment was created by mixing glue and borax solution, so there must be something in these two substances to create such a unique texture, right?

Yup! Glue expects to behave like a liquid, but the addition of the borax solution means that it was prevented from flowing like normal. This gave us a product that was liquid-like, but didn’t flow. This is called a polymer.

Polymers have qualities that are present in solid and liquid matter. It can shift to fill the shape of its container but can also be picked up like a sold. This is because the molecules in a polymer aren’t as tightly packed as in a solid but are still chained together more so than in a liquid. Other examples of polymers are rubber bands and jello.

Want a kit that makes this even easier? Get it here: