Spooky Slime!

There's nothing quite like a hot cup of pumpkin spice coffee on a raining, chilly, Sunday morning in October.  We are patiently waiting for all this rain to head out though, so we can start enjoying some fall festivities.  Bella has been wanting to go pumpkin picking and to Scarowinds, but the last couple weekends were a washout.  At least it let me catch up on some house cleaning and decorating.  On one of the rainy days last week, I was looking up some Halloween activities on Pinterest and came across this:

I loved this idea, so I made it with Bella.  She loved mixing it and stretching and playing with it.  I wanted to bring this activity to my classroom, but wasn't sure how to tie it in with their IEP goals.

As I thought about it and my students' goals, most of them have a reading or a writing goal.  I came up with the idea to make a poem about our slime.

I went out to the store to get the ingredients:

*liquid starch

*clear Elmer's glue

*bat confetti

I easily found liquid starch in the laundry area of the supermarket, and then found the glue in the school supplies area.  Super easy...but bat confetti...nope!  No luck!  I went to a whole bunch of stores.  I found pumpkin confetti, skull confetti, but NO bat confetti.  I know I've seen it so many times, but when I actually needed it, I couldn't find it.  So, on to Plan B.

At Dollar Tree, I found some rings with bats and spiders.  I also picked up some googly eyes.  Instead of bat slime, we were gonna make Spooky Slime!

I cut the ring part of the bats and spiders off.  They were thin enough that they would mix in the slime pretty well.

The next day, my kiddos helped me make the slime.  Since I have different groups at different times, we scaled down the recipe, so I could make a little bit with each group.  Instead of using 1/2 cup of water, liquid starch, and glue, I used 1/4 cup.  

First, we mixed the water and glue in a bowl.  I gave each of he students some bats, spiders, and googly eyes to mix in.  After that was all mixed together, we slowly stirred in the liquid starch.  Then we finished mixing it with our hands.

After a few minutes of hand mixing, our slime began to thicken.  As the students stretched and played with the slime, I asked them to think about how it feels, how it made hem feel, how it looks, etc.  

Then after playing with it for a few minutes, we separated the slime evenly and then put it in a baggy, so each student would have some.  We washed our hands, and then got working on our poems.

Our poems were formatted like this:

Spooky Slime

____  ____  ____

____  ____  ____

Spooky Slime

I asked my students to think of words that described the slime.  When they thought of their words (some needed to be prompted and guided), I wrote them on the table in front of them so they could spell it correctly (or mostly 😉).  For my kinder, I wrote down the words she told me in highlighter, then she traced over it.

After our poems were done, I laminated them (I used my personal laminator so I can do it right then and there).  Then we put them in our baggies with our slime.  The students each took turns reading them aloud to me and to each other.  They loved sharing their poems, and the loved even more that they could take their slime and poem home with them! 

Spooky slime was fun for my students and me!  It was fun watching them get so excited about their creations and their poems!  

Post a picture if you end up using this in your classroom.  I would LOVE to see it!

Ciao!