My Three Boys: Bartholomew and the Oobleck

Today is March 1st so we are kicking off Reading month with non other than Dr. Seuss. Eli picked out a great book: Bartholomew and the Oobleck from our library so I decided to do some fun stuff with the boys based along the book. After breakfast I rounded up the boys and we read "Bartholomew and the Oobleck." Its a really fun book and the boys loved it.

After we finished reading our book I gave the boys a coloring picture of the King from the book covered in Oobleck. This gave me some time to get all the stuff together for our next project.

Nice shades of green for the Oobleck!

Zeke coloring his king. Its the same picture as what is in the book.

Eli working on his picture.

Our first Oobleck recipe:

-2 cups corn starch

-1 cup water

-food coloring

The boys were finishing up their King pictures.

We put 2 cups of corn starch in a large bowl. Then I let the boys touch and explore it...be warned...this is messy!

I then filled a measuring cup with 1 cup of water and let the boys squirt food coloring into it. Make sure you add the food coloring to the water otherwise it will be next to impossible to mix it in once it hits the corn starch.

The boys then mixed the coloring into the water

We then poured the green water over top of the corn starch using TEAM WORK!

It looks runny but it is very hard. It took a little work but with a strong wooden spoon I was finally able to get it mixed together fairly well.

I then worked really hard and was able to get fairly equal parts of the Oobleck out onto cookie sheets for the boys so that they could play and explore the strange substance.

Eli made some really cool hand prints in his. We had a lot of fun with this and talked about how the Oobleck looked and felt. They thought it would be squishy but it turns out it was really hard!

The second Ooblick recipe that we used was:

-8oz of Elmers Glue

-water

-1 teaspoon of Borax

-food coloring

First step is to pour all the glue into a big bowl. After the bottle is empty fill it with warm water and shake it. Then pour the water into the bowl and mix it with the glue. Then add in your food coloring. The more you add the brighter your Oobleck will be. Mix in the food coloring and then set the bowl to the side. Next you take 1/2 a cup of warm-hot water and put 1 teaspoon of Borax into the water. Mix until the borax is dissolved. Then pour into the glue mixture and with a wooden spoon start stirring.

Stirring will be pretty easy at first but then it gets a little tricky so I took over and helped out. Make sure you use a strong wooden spoon.

It will gradually get clumpier and stickier. If it gets to hard to mix with the spoon then use your hands to mix it up. When there is no runny water or blue goo stuck to the sides of the bowl then your Oobleck is ready to play with. I was getting tired arms from mixing so I let it set a couple minutes while I put the ingredients away and then it finished mixing up well. Note that the food coloring will turn your hands colors! My boys hands are nice and blue now!

Once the Oobleck was ready I pulled it out of the bowl and put it on a cookie sheet. The boys loved exploring this. It was kind of slimy and stretchy, rubbery and bouncy.

So much fun!

If you let it rest it will spread out like a puddle.

stretchy!

Here are the two ooblecks that we made this morning. The blue one I like way more. It is less messy and stays pretty contained. The green is fun to play with because it looks like a liquid but is hard. It does dry up and get crumbly but vacuums up nice enough. We decided that the blue recipe was more like the Oobleck from the book. If we make this again I will probably use yellow food coloring. Just because now the boys hands are so blue from playing with this and yellow might not look as bad. You can probably do the no food coloring route as well but how fun would that be? I might try some washable paint next time and see if that works at all. You can also use glow in the dark paint too!