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Flubber Flows
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Children use Flubber to investigate how a solid can flow! They predict and model the properties of glaciers, view images of advancing glaciers, and create their own Flubber flow!
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Provides classroom connections, key concepts, connections to science standards, and additional resources.
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Flubber Flows
I used this as a potential part of our libraries summer reading program activities. I reviewed with several of my afterschool groups about the discovery of ice on other planets and moons, read Glaciers : Nature's Icy Caps by David Harrison and then we proceeded to make our flubber (glacier). The larger groups made several batches and we had a flubber "race", while the smaller, off site groups participated in making a single batch and then predicting the speed of the flow on our "mountain side" which was a plastic board painted in earthy colors. The kids were attentive to the presentation about ice on other planets and during the reading of the book, but they particularly enjoyed the process of making the flubber. (We'd done pumpkin slime in the fall of last year and they've been asking about making slime again). The part about watching the flubber travel slowly down our "mountain" was somewhat anti-climactic for some. Overall, the activity got a thumbs up from about 2/3 of the afterschool kids who range from grades 1-5. The consistency of the flubber in each group seemed to vary somewhat, I suspect that water may have been the variable - with some groups adding slightly more, others less than was strictly called for. Using a marker on the flubber proved difficult, so I used little chenille stem markers. In most cases, the flubber "scoured" the landscape of the "mountain", which is to say, it pulled paint off the plastic board, but this seemed to serve as an example of how glaciers scour the real landscape they flow through.