Flubber (or Oobleck or Gak…)

Landon is turning 3 next month! I can’t believe how fast time has gone by. He’s pretty much obsessed with Curious George (or Monkey George as he calls it) so we are going to have a Curious George Party. This is the first party where he’ll have friends and other kids that can play games and do activities, so I’ve been having fun planning out what we are going to do. I’ll post more about the party after it happens, but one thing I’m going to do is have “Curious Stations” where they can make or play with things that are unsusal. One of those things is Flubber. I’ve heard people call it different things. This is the stuff that most closely resembles silly puddy. Today we did a trial run of it and Landon pretty much played with the stuff all day long. One word of “warning” this stuff has Borax in it and is toxic if ingested. So please don’t make this with your 1 year old that still stuffs things in their mouth :-).

Materials

Mixture 1

1/2 cup warm water
1 cup Elmers glue
Food Coloring (optional)

Mixture 2

1.5 teaspoon Borax (in the laundry aisle)
1/2 cup warm water

Mix Mixture 1 in a quart sized zip lock bag (or a bowl).
Mix Mixture 2 in a separate bowl or cup until fully dissolved.
Pour Mixture 2 into Mixture 1 and mix well. It will start to thicken up, once this happens, you don’t need to mix anymore, the “flubbering” process is a chemical reaction that mixing won’t help (but feel free to mix if you want!)

Pouring the water into the bag

Empty the glue (2 regular sized glue bottles is a cup!)

Add food coloring if you want and mix well.

This is what it will look like when it starts the “flubbering” process. At this point you can just wait about 5 minutes for it to fully set. Pour any extra water off and dump it onto a table to start playing!

You can squish your fingers into it and leave a hand print (that will disappear if you wait long enough)

If you pull on it quickly it will “break”

And if you pull it slowly or hold it up in the air it will slowly pull and stretch!