A*maize*ing slime

Here’s a fun recipe to keep your kids occupied and to teach them about chemistry, baking and Ontario grown crops! This is a safe, non-toxic slime recipe that uses corn grown in Ontario!

Our A*Maize*ing corn based slime is slightly thicker than traditional slime, but still lots of fun to play with! This recipe uses corn starch and corn oil, hence the a*maize*ing name! The recipe also uses school safe glue. Did you know that glue can actually be made out of wheat flour?

Measure out your ingredients before starting! Once you start mixing, you do not want to stop or the slime may start to harden!

This recipe starts by mixing school safe glue, you can use either white or clear, and mixing it with your choice of food colouring and glitter, if you’d like. We got ours from a dollar store and it has a mix of different coloured glitter.

In order to make the slime “slimy” and stringy, we added dish soap. The glycerin in the soap helps to add a flexible consistency. Any dish soap will work, as long as it has glycerin in it. Glycerin is the active ingredient in most soaps, the slipperiness of it helps to slide food and dirt off of dishes.

Mix it all together and slowly add some of the corn starch. Take this as an opportunity to teach your kids the effect that adding corn starch has on liquids! Similar to flour, corn starch has a very powerful ability of thickening liquids, that’s why they are often used in gravies or sauces!

After adding half of the corn starch and it is mostly mixed in, add in the oil. We used corn-based oil to keep up with the a*maize*ing theme, but you could use soybean or another vegetable oil. Adding oil helps to prevent the glue from making the slime sticky. It gives the slime a slightly “slimier” feel! Have your kids feel the oil and explain how it feels slippery on their hands. That’s why its used on baking sheets or frying pans to prevent foods from sticking or on mechanical parts to prevent friction!

Slowly mix in the rest of the corn starch and continue stirring. Eventually it will get to hard to mix with a spoon and you will have to get your hands dirty! This part is really fun for kids, not so fun for the cleanliness of your kitchen. Don’t worry if you get any corn starch or slime on your clothing, it will come out in the wash! Lots of laundry detergents actually have corn starch in them!

As you knead it, similar to you would with bread, it will become more and more flexible and stringy!

Ingredients

• 2/3 of a cup of corn starch
• 1 tbsp of dish soap
• 2tsp of corn oil
• 1/4 of a cup of school glue (non-toxic)
• Food colouring (optional)
• Glitter (optional)

Directions:

1. Mix glue, food colouring and glitter in a large bowl
2. Add in dish soap
3. Mix in half of the corn starch, stirring throughout
4. Drizzle in corn oil
5. Add in the rest of the corn starch a small amount at a time, stirring throughout
6. Knead using hands for several minutes until desired stringiness
7. Store in a sealed bag or container to prevent hardening
8. If slime starts to dry, add more glue and knead for a few minutes
9. To clean up, throw out slime in garbage, do not put it down the sink.
10. When washing the containers, make sure to mix them with a lot of water to prevent your sink from clogging.

Although our slime is non-toxic, you should not eat the slime and should wash your hands after playing with it.

Got Extra Corn Starch?

Try making a substance called “Oobleck” from the Dr. Seuss book called Bartholomew and the Oobleck! It’s a substance that has the qualities of a liquid and a solid, so it’s known as known as a non-Newtonian fluid! It’s easy to make… just corn starch and water! Use 1 cup of water and slowly mix in 1 to 2 cups of corn starch until it starts to harden! We added food colouring to ours to make it more exciting!

This is a great chance to talk about chemistry and how everything is made up of particles that interact with one another! Interestingly, pressing on the surface of the substance will make it feel hard like a solid, because it forces the corn starch particles together and increases the viscosity (thickness). If you dip your hand into the substance or try to hold it in your hands, it slides through your fingers like a liquid! By moving slowly, the corn starch particles have time to move out of the way! It’s a great way to show your kids that by applying pressure, you can change a substance to solid or liquid state!