Borax-Free Gak

Borax free Gak is so much fun. The kids love the texture and tried to manipulate it throughout their experience. I have always wanted to make homemade Gak or Slime Dough. However, every recipe I had found for the stuff contained Borax, and I wasn’t comfortable having my kids play with it. I finally found a good recipe without Borax at Fun at Home with the Kids. Thank you, Asia. She actually calls this “slime dough,” but I grew up calling it Gak because of Nickelodeon, so I’m going with it. It sounds like she invented this recipe, so I’d love you to head on over and see her experience and advice with it. I’m so glad I found the recipe. It was super easy to make. Despite the look of the mess of this project, it was very easy to clean up because it is just shampoo, corn starch, food coloring and water. I thought, from the looks of it, it might be a disaster of a mess and almost did it outside. However, my experience was really positive. I was kind of disappointed in the color is my only complaint. The kids wanted to make purple, and we tried with red and blue, but we ended up with a muddy pink color. I didn’t want to add too much color after it was mixed. I would just go with a straight color from your food coloring collection. Asia did a blue, which is really fun.

The kids went to work measuring, pouring and mixing up the concoction. Please visit Fun at Home with Kids for the Borax Free Gak Recipe. As we played with it, it would dry out a bit, and I would add one tablespoon as needed to keep it at the texture we wanted. I would really just throw more water on the table and the kids would mix in together with their hands.

I did some hand mixing in the end until the mixture was ready for play. I started out having the kids play over the bowl and then thought, “That’s not nearly as fun as it could be.” I took it out and let them play on the table at that point, and as stated, it was a really easy clean up in the end.