Activity Overview
Make some recycled bottle cap boats and set up a Foil River Regatta right in your own backyard. Young children will enjoy creating their own waterway and racing their homemade boats down the river.
Be prepared for hours of fun as the kids get more and more resourceful and ditch the boats and try sending other things floating down their homemade river. Leaves and acorns and pine needles were some popular items that easily drifted away with the flow of the water.
Materials Needed
- Plastic Bottle Cap ( medium sized)
- Hot glue gun
- Toothpicks
- Colored card stock
- A roll or two of aluminum foil
- A garden hose with a water source
How to Make and Play
- Cut out some 2 inch triangles out of colored card stock.
- Use your glue gun to run a line of glue up on each edge of the triangles.
- Lay your toothpicks over the glue line and press the toothpicks into each of the glue lines, leaving some of the toothpick exposed.
- Lay some plastic bottle caps face up on your work surface.
- Squirt a dab of glue into the center of the inside of the cap. Add a little extra glue around the center for more weight.
- Allow the glue to dry slightly ( this happens quickly), then stick the exposed bottom of the toothpick into the glue dot and hold until it dries completely.
- If your bottle cap boat is too top heavy, you can trim the sail into a slimmer triangle.
- Unroll 2 an excessively long lengths of aluminum foil. Lay them on top of one another and mold them together by folding up the edges on both sides so that it can hold water that can run down it like a river.
- It is best if you can set the foil river up on a slight inclined piece of ground with the hose at the top.
- Once the water starts making its way down the foil river. Launch your bottle cap boats down the river.
- Turn the hose on a trickle at one end.
