How to Make Homemade Floam
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Have you heard of floam? Would you like to know how to make floam? If you are not sure what it is, it is just slime plus foam (or rather styrofoam balls). We made some homemade floam this week. It has been on my to-do list for MONTHS and I am excited we finally tackled this fun sensory learning activity. I have the floam recipe for you today & it’s super easy, plus it’s something kids will love!
I was at Target a couple of months back and saw this fun educational set that had floam and some letters and numbers to build on. I decided I had to try and create something like that!
The first step was learning how to make homemade floam. We have loved doing variations of slime in the past, so this was the latest experiment. (Did you know I also have an edible floam recipe?)
How to Make Floam
It is really simple to make! It’s honestly hard to mess it up. If you have ever tried making slime, it is almost exactly the same. It is basically just your regular slime recipe with little styrofoam micro-beads added in.
Homemade Floam Recipe
2/3 cup water, you’ll want it to be warm
1/3 cup white glue
2 tsp borax
1 c. styrofoam beads– They have all colors of styrofoam beads, even rainbow ones! Or you can just get white ones and color the slime with food coloring. These are the beads they use to fill bean bags.
To start the floam recipe, mix the borax with 1/3 c. water. Stir until the powder is dissolved in the water. Mix the glue with the other 1/3 c. water.
Add in the foam beads to the glue mixture and mix well. Once the glue and styrofoam are combined, quickly stir in the borax solution. Mix it well and mix it fast.
This awesome homemade floam is SO much fun to play with! My kids and I made it in a bunch of colors and had a great time with it.
After it was done, I gave my preschool-aged daughter some learning mats to use it with. I printed some alphabet and number tracing pages out for her to build the letters and numbers. I also used the number dot pages from my preschool math set for her to make floam dots for the numbers.
But preschoolers are not the only ones who love to play with this. All of my kids played with it for hours, and even days. Ok, even I loved playing with this.
We made 5 different colors of floam, blue, green, yellow, pink and rainbow! Rainbow was my favorite.
Where to Buy Floam Ingredients:
I got the rainbow styrofoam beads on Amazon. You could also buy a big pack of the white ones used to make bean bags and add your own colors.
Borax is a laundry soap ingredient. Many people avoid using this since it is toxic, but just warn your kids not to eat it and to wash hands after playing with it! If you don’t want the borax powder, you could try substituting contact solution which also has some boric acid in it and provides the same results.
Want my letter and number tracing mats to play with your play dough or float on? They are a free download!
Want some borax-free floam? Try making the non-toxic edible floam recipe made from gummy bears and sprinkles!
Try some of my other slime recipes, too!
We have our favorite Traditional Slime, or try some of my Edible Slime recipes!
You know you want to try it out! Doesn’t that look satisfying?
