Posted in My Homeschool FAQs

As you may have guessed from my last post, we are doing a Egypt study right now.  Todays project was making Papyrus!  Well, not really...But we did make recycled paper!  I found the directions for this project at the Magic Tree House Website.  Here is a link to the PDF file. 

Here are the basic steps we did:

After soaking torn pieces of used notebook paper overnight in water we pureed it in the blender along with some dryer lint. (My kids thought it was hilarious that we actually found a craft to do that called for dryer lint!) 


Next we added 2 cups of water mixed with 1 tablespoon cornstarch


Just for fun we added some colorful paper confetti


Then we placed the mixture in a wood frame covered with screen.


Once the mixture is pressed onto the frame we flip it and blotted the excess water out with a sponge.


Here is a completed sheet of our paper. (Still very wet.)The dryer lint gave it the nice blue color.  Now we want to start saving different colors of lint and see what colors of paper we can make!


The kids had fun making the paper.  While we had the cornstarch out they wanted to play with cornstarch and water.  If you have never done this before it is the weirdest thing!  When you mix the 2 together you get a mixture that is sometimes solid & sometimes liquid.  You can pickup a big glob and it is solid, but then if you stop agitating it the mixture becomes liquid and will run through your fingers...Oh, what fun!!!

Here you can see my son is rolling a big glob in the palms of his hands.  It will become very firm and feel like you are rolling a ball in your hands..

In this shot my daughter is letting the mixture turn to liquid!

My 3 year old really doesn't know what to think of this!  LOL


And just to give you all full disclosure it is also VERY MESSY!!!! 


I took these pictures because the kids are frequently complaining that now that the house is for sale all I do is make them clean!  LOL  Here is my proof that I let them make messes too!  LOL

All the MESS was worth it though to see these SMILES!!


If you want to read about the Science of mixing cornstarch and water CLICK HERE

If you want to see a really cool video of cornstarch and water being manipulated in lab CLICK HERE.

Last but not least...Here is what happens if you have a whole pool filled with cornstarch and water! (Otherwise known as non-newtonian fluid)  You DO NOT want to miss this video!  (BTW, DO NOT go and read the comments under the video.  Most of them are not nice.  If you don't listen to me and read them please do not get mad at me!  I didn't write them!) This video reminded me that I use to get a little wading pool every Summer (Back when I only had one kiddo!) and we would fill it with cornstarch & water.  My son would play in it all Summer.  We would just keep adding water.  When he was done we would hose him off.  Talk about cool and refreshing!  He just loved it!  My kids are going to want a pool of cornstarch once I show them this video!  LOL