OOBLECK Kiddie Pool

Our homeschool co-op's End of Year Party featured Paint Twister this year; last year's was a Kiddie Pool of Oobleck. We had a fantastic time... and now I want to do this on Friday afternoons at Summer Camp as part of our Water Fest. So now here I am on the internet looking up how much cornstarch it takes to make a kiddie pool of oobleck. As always, I like to make my notes in the blog so that I can find them later.

Bartholomew and the Oobleck
by Dr. Seuss

Here are my notes from back in 2016, when I first learned about Oobleck!

You can have children just go for it -- mixing cornstarch and water and seeing what happens -- or you can do a ratios mini-lesson featuring Oobleck. I used my Recipes with Wooden Stars technique to teach the recipe and it worked great. Two red stars and one green. The recipe is two parts cornstarch to one part water. All ingredients at room temperature. Heating it up ruins it. Just mix with a spoon. Precise measuring is key to your success! Oh, this concoction is super-fun and it's great for assessing students' scientific observation. For clean up you MUST use a DRY paper towel. Clean off your hands well with the dry paper towel and throw it in the trash. Scoop the oobleck out of your bowl with a spoon and throw it in the trash. We let our bowls sit outside and get filled with rain by mistake before we washed them and it was easy to wash it. Becca did notice, before it rained, that the stuff outside had dried out and wasn't acting like oobleck any more but if she added water she could revive it. That was a nice review on ratios. If water evaporates out, the proportion isn't kept consistent. Add more water so you get back to that two red stars and one green star... you have oobleck again.

Natalie brought this recipe home from her high school science class. Thank you Natalie! If you haven't tried making oobleck at home, go for it!

Here are my notes from 2023, when I wanted to make a kiddie pool of it:

According to this post, 50 lbs of cornstarch fills a 5 1/2 foot diameter plastic baby pool with oobleck 3 inches deep.

The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada shared a ton of helpful notes, including measurements, setup (plus approximate time for mixing), and cleanup.They used 150 lbs of cornstarch to fill a 5 foot diameter plastic swimming pool and 40 lbs when filling a 35” x 15” x 5” plastic bin.

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