Note: If let to sit, the ball will become flat on one side. Simply rolling it between your hands should make it round again. STEP 4: Time to dig in with your hands. Begin kneading one of the glue mixture globs, working with one blob at a time. 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. This product will support your students' understanding of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)*, as shown in the table below.

Make sure to wash your hands after making and playing with your bouncy balls. Wash all surfaces too! See slime safety notes here.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… Picture the difference between wet spaghetti and leftover spaghetti the next day. As the slime forms, the tangled molecule strands are much like the clump of spaghetti! Is slime a liquid or solid? 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 develop models to describe the atomic composition of simple molecules and their structures or properties. To make your own borax bouncy balls you will use a variation of our Borax Slime recipe. Where do I buy borax powder?

Your homemade bouncy balls use a variation of one of our five basic slime recipes. All our slime recipes are super easy to make for a fun activity anytime! We make slime all the time, and these have become our go-to favorite slime recipes!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 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. Students can gain firsthand experience with polymers and learn more about synthetic materials and where they come from. Using the Bouncing Ball Class Kit, students can investigate, gather and make sense of information about synthetic materials.