This is a fun kit full of all sorts of surprises! The Magic School Bus: Slime and Polymer Lab offers your child all sorts of slimy and squishy fun. For ages five and up, the kit is pleasing to the eye right from the get-go in the yellow cardboard Magic School Bus it comes in! Stacked in layers with a huge variety of water-absorbing polymers, your children are going to have great fun with this product!

Enclosed in the kit are 20 sturdy experiment cards, a Data Notebook to record your experiment results, and ten containers of polymers. What is a polymer? Merriam-Webster defines it this way: “A chemical compound or mixture of compounds formed by a chemical reaction in which two or more molecules combine to form larger molecules that contain repeating structural units.” In the ten containers are chemical compounds (polymers) that produce goop, slime, fake snow, super-absorbent flowers, balls, or marbles, gel crystals, and a lot more. You can even germinate included seeds in the polymer that come with the kit! Each card has a different process and uses one or more of the components. The cards give clear instructions and anyone ages 5 and up that can read can do the experiments. An older brother or sister, mom or dad, can also help the little ones. This is a multi-age family kit.

My children had all sorts of fun and (hidden) learning with this kit. I say hidden because it was so enjoyable they didn’t realize they were being educated at the same time. From creating a huge ball to making their own slime, this was one big extended activity of science and amusement all mixed together. There was very little they could not do on their own and each day brought the kids to me full of excitement at the changes the polymers would make. This went on for weeks and the marble polymers were shared with friends, left in jars to get as big as they could and then experiment with them once they had reached maximum capacity. How much pressure could they exert on a fully expanded polymer? Could it withstand the pressure of air after being in a watery jar for two weeks? Were there eyeballs in the jar or polymers? There is still a lot more we have yet to do with it!

The Slime and Polymer Lab is available for $39.99. I think the price is just right for the many activities and learning options a family is able to enjoy with it. There is nothing like hands-on science experiments and this kit is loaded with them!

Product review by Lisa Johnson, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, May, 2013