Sliming With Kids: Combine fun with learning activities to teach real-world lessons

Slime is a great sensory material that provides endless hours of fun for kids (from 3 to 99!). Once you introduce your child to kid slime, chances are that they (and you too!) will get hooked to this mushy, gooey material that’s raging a storm worldwide. But it can be a great learning tool too, teaching kids motor skills and creativity as well. And, the more they explore with different textures, colors, and consistencies of slime, the better they’ll learn and understand important real-world lessons.

Here are two great activities to explore with kids using slime.

Bubbling Slime

One way to use slime for kids, in an engaging way, is to have them blow slime into bubbles. To play this game, take a dough of slime and push a straw into it. Then, have your child blow through the straw and see what happens. If your slime is relatively elastic, they’ll soon see it bubbling, like a balloon. 

This game is great fun if you have two or more kids competing against each other. By giving each child a large slime dough, and using an egg-timer to keep score, you can ask each child to blow as many bubbles all around their slime ball as possible. The child that blows the most in a given time (a minute) wins!

Learning tip: Make sure they learn the importance of sealing the entrance to where the straw punctures their kid slime ball.  If they don’t do so, they’ll end up blowing their hearts out – with no bubbling reward!

Building Slime

Learning about shapes and sizes is a very important lesson for children, especially as they prepare to enter formal learning environments – day care and kindergartens. Parents, guardians, and teachers can use slime for kids to teach children some invaluable lessons about geometry – while also having fun at the same time.

You’ll need several small containers, of different shapes – the insides of match boxes, bottle caps of various sizes, or even cookie cutters – for this learn with fun project.

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Next, ask the kids to mold their slime into shapes and sizes matching each of the containers. To test who wins, ask them to place their creations into each shape, to see how well they fit. The ones with the most matches are the winners!

Learning tip: An important lesson you can teach your child, using this kid slime exercise, is the value of measurements. Let them try the exercise in two steps. First, have them create their forms simply by eyeballing the shape and size of the containers. Then, have them press the container onto the slime dough to trace its shape, and then form the product. They’ll have more closely fits in the second round, highlighting the importance of measurements.  

Other Fun Ways to Learn with Slime

Parents and teachers can use slime for kids in other ways too, such as building numbers, letters of the alphabet, and everyday objects, such as cars, trees, and houses. The important thing here is, that using this medium (slime) as a learning tool is both fun and educational. It hones motor and sensory skills, while unlocking the creative side of your child’s imagination.

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