Posts Tagged ‘children’

At my younger son’s preschool, we have two sensory bins, one “wet” and one “dry”. This week, in the “wet” sensory bin, the parent in charge had made a huge supply of gak. My four year old had so much fun with it, we decided to try it out at home. Basically, “gak” is a long polymer, or a long strand of connecting molecules. For older (and younger) kids, you can take this lesson a step further by cooking up some spaghetti. Fresh cooked spaghetti slithers and slides all over each other, you can show your children that they are acting like long molecules, or polymers as well. After a while, the spaghetti starts sticking together, and if you’re brave, you can squish it and make it bounce on the floor (just like gak!).  In real life, polymers that slide (like wet cooked spaghetti) are more liquid, whereas polymers that stick and bounce (like drier cooked spaghetti) are called elastomers and are used in things like rubber! For the preschool set though, this was purely a sensory and fun science activity in showing how two things combined together would make something called “gak”.

What You’ll Need:

• 1 teaspoon Borax (you can find it in the laundry aisle)
• Elmer’s school glue, 8oz bottle
• 1/2 cup warmish water
• food coloring **optional**
• mixing bowl
• freezer bag or tupperware (you’ll want someplace to store the awesome gak when you’re done!)

Here are all the ingredients you will need. Easy enough, eh?

Pour all the glue into your bowl. Once it is empty, fill the empty glue bottle  with warm water, put the cap back on, shake to get all the glue bits loose, and pour it out again into the bowl. This is also a good step to add in any food coloring (we chose blue).

My four year old was checking to make sure the glue bottle was *really* empty.

Next, take your borax, dissolve in the 1/2 cup warm water, and stir. (it’s ok if not everything dissolved and there are some granules at the bottom, as long as most of it dissolves)

 Then, add the borax mixture to the glue in your bowl. You should instantly be able to see the mixture bond together to form long molecules. My four year old looks properly impressed and surprised. (He was skeptical about this experiment only having two ingredients)

Keep mixing, and eventually you’ll end up with a big, flexible ball of gak.

Pancake gak!

We had gak races, taking a glob each and seeing who could make the longest strand before theirs broke (my four year old always won, coincidence?)

When my seven year old came home from school, he immediately wanted to play in the gak as well. We involved hands AND feet. The best part was the super big smiles all around. Go forth and make your own gak today! This post heartily endorsed by my four year old.

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Adventures in Mommydom

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