IN THE CLASSROOM:It’s ‘slime time’ for a lesson plan

It has the color of radioactive ooze — at least, the way it looked in those old “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” cartoons — the texture of Jell-O and the consistency of rubber cement. It dangles when you pour it out of a cup and glows bright green when you turn out the lights.

It’s called slime, and it’s part of the science curriculum this year at Killybrooke Elementary School.

Twice a week, Science Adventures instructor Elizabeth White stops by the central Costa Mesa school to lead hands-on science lessons for various grade levels. Last week, she treated the sixth-graders to a project they might have tried at home, if only they knew the right ingredients.

“Is it the glow-in-the-dark goo?” a student asked White in the multipurpose room on Thursday as she began to introduce the lab.

“It is the green goo,” she gamely replied.

As White demonstrated, creating slime involves two very simple ingredients — and some not-so-simple chemical interactions. To start, she gave each student a Dixie cup filled with phosphorescent carbon and a small beaker of sodium borate, which gelled into a bright, quivery substance when mixed with a popsicle stick.

Call it slime, call it goo, but in reality, it was a lesson in polymers and catalysts. The carbon was the polymer, a substance with many intertwined strands of material, while the sodium borate — the catalyst — caused the molecules to fuse together.

To help demonstrate the science of slime, White had the students act out a number of scenarios. At one point, she had the entire class stand in a circle holding hands, then do so with crossed arms — showing how a catalyst tightens matter.

White, who has worked for Science Adventures for eight years and travels to other Newport-Mesa schools, said hands-on demonstrations helped to bring science alive for younger students.

“I know kindergarteners who can name 20 different elements off the periodic table,” she said.

When the students were done mixing their slime, White turned out the lights, and tiny green globs glowed around the multipurpose room. Still, it wasn’t the messiest lab that the sixth-graders had done this year. The month before, the class had dissected squids.

“The tentacles got stuck on my hand,” said Robert Murtha, 11. “It was fun, but it stunk.”