Can you make slime that acts like a spiderweb? With this fun slime experiment, you can! Just two ingredients creates sticky spider silk for hours of fun!
Halloween is one of the favorite holidays at our house. In fact, with seven weeks to go to Halloween, my youngest just brought out her pumpkin bucket and asked to go trick or treating.
We also love slime recipes and STEM activities.
So, like the educator that I am, I wanted to meld these two loves together. This is how we created the spider slime experiment.
Make your own spider slime experiment by following our directions below. Go here to find more Halloween STEM activities!
Spooky Halloween Spider Slime Experiment: Messy Halloween Fun!
Fair warning, this project is MESSY. We had sticky spider silk all over the house, porch, clothes, and kids. Luckily, the glue washes right out. I recommend doing this project outdoors and in old clothes just in case.
What you’ll need:
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Elmer’s Liquid School Glue, Premium Clear, Washable, 1 Gallon, 1 Count – Great For Making SlimeFood Coloring Liqua-Gel – 6 Color Rainbow Kit in .75 fl. oz. (20ml) BottlesPurex Sta-Flo Liquid Starch, 64 OunceOriginal Stationery Arts and Crafts Glitter Shake Jars, Extra Fine, 24 Multi color Set
- Liquid starch (about 1/4 of a cup)
- Clear glue (1 4 oz bottle)
- A toy spider
- Plastic tray
Pour your bottle of glue into a container. We like these plastic trays for messy fun. Add a small amount of liquid starch (we started with a tablespoon or two and gradually kept adding it until the mixture started to form into a ball). Mix with a spoon until the starch forms a goopy ball. You don’t want to add so much starch that the glue won’t stretch.
Start working the mixture between your hands. You’ll see in our photos that at first, the glue mixture looks more like traditional borax slime, but after working it for a while, it turned into the spider silk strings we were looking for.
Let the kids play in the sticky spider silk slime as long as they like. We added a spider made from pipe cleaner so that our spiderweb home had an occupant. If you own plastic spiders, they would also make an excellent addition to this activity.
This spider slime experiment is a fun way to introduce the concepts of non-Newtonian liquids and polymer bonds to kids. You can read more about the science behind slime here.
More Halloween STEM Activities
Halloween Science Experiments to Delight Your Kids With
Build a Monster Engineering Activity
Brain Surgery Halloween Science Activities
Want More Halloween STEAM? (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math)
Find more amazing Halloween STEAM activities in the STEAM Kids Halloween book!