Science: Make Handmade Paper the Easy Way!

I have put off making handmade, recycled paper with the Snails for a few weeks. I have made paper before and I hated the process. Plus, I didn't have that screen on a frame thing. You know, the fancy smancy mold? When I read in our Classic Science lessons from E=McQ that I could use pantyhose instead of screen material, I was happy to see that there was a simpler way to make paper! Seriously, we did this in less than an hour and I used materials we had around the house.

You will need:

Old Newspaper

Water

Food Coloring

Embroidery Hoop

Cornstarch

Pantyhose

Wax Paper

Old Towel or Washcloth

Pan of some kind

Bowl

Blender, Food Processor, or Chopper

Directions

1. Put the inner ring of an embroidery hoop inside the leg of pair of pantyhose. Push it to the end of the toe, and pull it as tight as you can.

2. Cut off the excess pantyhose that you do not need.

3. Pull it has tight as you can, put on the outer ring of the embroidery hoop, and tie the end of the pantyhose into a knot.

3. Tear newspaper into tiny pieces. This is great to build the muscles in your child's hands. Soak the newspaper pieces in a bowl of water for 10 minutes.

4. Mix 1/4 cup of water and 1/8 of a cup (2 tablespoons) of cornstarch together.

5. If you want, you can tear up your soaking newspaper even more. If you do this, it will stain your fingers.

6. Drain off all of the water from the newspaper. You can even squeeze out the excess.

7. Add your wet newspaper and the cornstarch/water mixture to a blender (I used a food chopper). I just added a bit of paper and a bit of water at a time and added more of each as I needed it. Little Snail said it was ugly, so we added about 8 drops of food coloring. Mix it all up until it gets very mushy. This is about 2 minutes. We did it for 5 or so minutes because it was just a lot of fun to press the button on the chopper.

8. Put your mixture onto your pantyhose frame. Make sure that your frame is in a pan. This will catch all of the water.
9. Spread it out evenly on the frame.

10. You can place a piece of wax paper over the top of the frame and use a rolling pin to mash out the water. We just used our fingers.

11. We wanted a faster way to soak up the water, so we sandwiched the frame inside of a wash cloth. We then mashed out the rest of the water.

12. You can wait a day or two for it to dry.

13. But, that's not our style so we used the hair dryer.

14. We stored our excess pulp in the fridge for later. It was fun to squeeze the squishy mess while it was in the bag.

15. When our paper dried, it was very tough. Like construction paper. This was a lot of fun and super duper quick! This method would be perfect for a co-op science lesson on handmade paper making. This activity is part of our I Stink! and Recycling unit study.

This lesson is from Scott McQuerry's Classic Elementary Science, Life Science; Unit 1: Basic Needs/Resources; Chapter 3: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, page 27.