At The Fair

Last weekend my town held a fair and I got to run a booth. I thought I would share my experiences with it. While it was overall successful (and very fun) there were several mishaps along the way.

My original plan was to have a
bowl of Oobleck as a demo for kids to play with. I was also going to let them make and keep their own sample of Glurch. I gathered all my supplies and put them in a bag the night before. I even made a poster and these nice recipe note cards for the kids to take with them.




It's a nice afternoon, and I mix up the Oobleck. My first kid comes up, looking kind of hesitant. I had planned out all these things to say and explanations, but I blanked and all I could come up with was "Poke it. It's weird." After he leaves I start getting out the materials for the Glurch. I pull out the water and cornstarch, then realize I left the Borax at home!

Someone ran home to get me some, but for the time being I decided to have them make Oobleck to take home instead (I had just brought the whole container of cornstarch so I had enough). This went pretty well. The only problem was that we had to eyeball all the measurements and kept on pouring in too much  water so we then had to add more cornstarch to compensate.

The Borax arrived within an hour (and just in the nick of time, we were nearly out of cornstarch). I mixed up the solution in a cup we scrounged up from somewhere and we started making that instead. I'm just going to say right now that if I hadn't had 2 friends to help me this whole event would have been much more difficult. Sometimes only one kid would be present, and sometimes a whole flock would come by, and we'd have one person fill the cups with glue, one person add the water, and one person add the Borax.

The rest of the event went smoothly. I actually had to end a little early because I ran out of all the glue and all the cornstarch. I don't know how many kids came by but looking at how many paper cups we used I'd have to say at least 100.

Other observations are that it was really messy. My tablecloth was covered in cornstarch and my hands were covered in food coloring. I brought stirring sticks for people to mix the Glurch with but I should have brought more because kids kept walking off with them. I also should have brought more paper towels because we ran out early on and had to keep grabbing more from the food vendors.

So I definitely would do something like this again. Next time though, I'm going to try to be more prepared.