boat Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Thanksgiving Tangram Puzzles for Kids

October 30, 2018 By Deirdre

Tangram Puzzles are a great way for kids to explore shapes. Children will need to slide, rotate or flip shapes for them to fit into a tangram puzzle. This set of Thanksgiving-themed tangram puzzles features a Native American or Indian, a turkey, and a boat. Your children will have fun using homemade, printed or store-bought tangrams with these mats.

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Before your children explore the tangram puzzle mats, you may want to teach them a Thanksgiving-themed children’s book. Below you will find some of my favorite books with a Thanksgiving theme.

Getting Your Set of Tangram Puzzles

You can download the set of Thanksgiving Tangram Puzzle Workspaces and open them up with Acrobat Reader. The set was designed to be printed out on a color printer. If you prefer to print them out on a black and white printer, they will have feature a lot of grays.

You will also find a tangram pattern in the set. You can print the set onto Thanksgiving-themed scrapbooking paper or fall themed copy paper if you don’t want to make a set or use a store-bought set.

Exploring the Tangram Puzzles

There are a number of ways you could share these puzzles with your children. Below you will find a list of ways that I came up with. You may come up with other great ideas. If you do please take a moment and share them on my Facebook page or in a comment below.

You could place them in a center or put them out on the kitchen table for your children to explore one at a time.
You could have them explore all of the puzzles at the same time. Then they can decide which was the easiest and which was the hardest to do.
You could put them out on Thanksgiving Day. Your children could work on them while you are working on the Thanksgiving feast.
You could put them out a school Thanksgiving celebration for children to work on with their parents.

If you like this tangram activity, here are some more you will want to explore:

Halloween Puzzles for Tangrams

Fall Themed Puzzle Mats for Tangrams

Fox in Socks Puzzles for Tangrams

Challenge Cards for Tangrams

Build the Pilgrims a Tin Foil Boat STEM Challenge

November 14, 2017 By Deirdre

This week I am sharing with you several Thanksgiving-themed STEM challenges. Today’s STEM challenge is building a tin foil boat for Pilgrims and some of their supplies to travel in. If you want your children to explore building a tin foil boat first, you could have them do a tin foil boat penny challenge.

Getting Ready for the STEM Challenge

Creating the Pilgrims

There are several things you are going to do to get ready for the STEM challenge. The first is to create a set of Pilgrims.

Supplies

Unfinished Wood Peg People
Black Acrylic Paint
White Felt

Directions

You will need to paint the bodies of the peg people black.
Then you will need to cut out a collar for each of the peg people and a hat for the Pilgrim lady out of felt, We cut ours out freehand. (I am working a set of patterns you can use for them.)
Next, you will need to glue the collars and hat on the Pilgrims.

Gathering the Boat Supplies

Your children will need the following supplies to create the boat.

Supplies

Foil
Clay
Bendy Straws
Card Stock
Wooden Blocks*

*Your children will use the wooden blocks to represent the supplies the Pilgrims are traveling with.

Getting the Recording Printable

You will need to print out a copy of the Build the Pilgrims a Boat Challenge for each of your children. The printable was designed to be printed out on a black-and-white printer.

Conducting the STEM Challenge

Your children will need to design a boat that will not only float on the water it will need to carry the pilgrims and their supplies.

Once they have drawn out their design, they will need to create the boat and its sails.

Finally, they will need to test out their design. If they find it doesn’t float well, they will need to work on a redesign.

Building Background

You may want to read your children a book about the pilgrims before starting this challenge. Below you will find a few books that will help them build their background knowledge of them.

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Boat Craft- Paper Plate Boat with Waves

March 24, 2017 By Deirdre

This week we have explored several boat activities. We started the week with a post on How to Make a Recycled Boat. Yesterday I shared how we made two tin foil boats for the penny challenge. Today I have a boat craft for you!

This fun paper plate boat with waves rocks back and forth. Kids will love watching it move in the waves!

Boat Craft

Craft Supplies

Two paper plates per child
Scissors
Glue stick
Blue muffin cups
Green Paint
Two brass fasteners per child

Putting the Boat Craft Together

You need to start by cutting the boat shape out of one paper plate. The other paper plate you will cut in half.

You can create a more elaborate boat shape if you like. You could just cut out a window and the sides of the boat. We cut out circular cut-outs. We thought they made the windows more boat like. If you like the rectangular window, that would look great too.

After cutting out the boat, you need to paint the area below the window a bright color on the back of the plate. We painted out boat green! If you want to keep your kids from accidentally painting the top of the boat, you can cover it up.

When the paint is dry, you can add stripes or other decorations to the boat. We cut a strip out of the unused half of the second paper plate to make a stripe.

After adding the stripe or decorations, it is time to add the waves. Cupcake liners cut in half were glued facing up and facing down onto the boat. You can glue them on any way that you like.

Finally. the two paper plates will be joined at the bow (front) and stern (back) with brass fasteners when you are done painting and gluing.The backs of the plates should both be facing out. It will make the boat easier to rock!

Now it is time to rock your boats. We found that the boat rocked well on all kinds of surfaces.

Here are more paper plate crafts you will love:

Pete the Cat Paper Plate Mask

Green Eyed Tree Frog Mask

Cupcake Liner Jellyfish

STEM Gardening- Paper Plate Greenhouse

Tin Foil Boat Ideas for the STEM Penny Challenge

March 22, 2017 By Deirdre

When you look up tin foil boat ideas on the Internet, you find a number of them feature a foil raft design. We decided to see if we could find another tin foil boat idea that would be as successful as the flat raft.

Before building boats with your children, you may want to read a book to them that features a boat. You will find some of my favorites below.
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Tin Foil Boat Ideas

You may want to give your children a piece of tin foil and let them come up with their own boat building design. You could also share with them the two designs we tried. If they are having trouble coming up with design ideas, trying our designs out might inspire them.

Tin Foil Boat Idea One – Hat Design

The first design you may want to have your children try out is the hat design. Your children will need to fold the rectangular piece of foil in half. Then they will fold the two upper corners down 2/3 of the way to form a pointed top. Next, they will fold up each of the bottom edges of the foil. They will fold the front side of the foil up in the front and back piece up in the back.

The hat will need to be opened up on the inside to make the boat wider. Then you will pinch the ends of the hat to keep water from flowing in.

Tin Foil Boat – Raft Design

You will start with a rectangular piece of foil. First, you will need to fold in each of the edges of the foil about 1/2 inch. Then you open up the fold edges and stand them straight up. Finally, you will pinch the corners together to close off the edges.

Our Penny Challenge Insights

We found that the raft floated the longest and held the most pennies.
The hat boat did float and it did hold a few pennies.
A penny needed to be added either side of the hat boat one at a time to keep it from tipping over.

Here are some more boat themed activities we have tried:

How to Make a Boat with Recycled Materials

STEM Activities-How to Make a Balloon Boat

How Long will a LEGO Boat Float?

How to Build a Paddle Boat

STEM Activities – Making a Balloon Boat Move

June 20, 2016 By Deirdre

It’s a balloon! It’s a boat! It is STEM activities that look at balloons moving boats! Well, I guess I should say the balloon help the boat move. This summer I have shared with you a number STEM activities and science experiments with water. There was the LEGO man sink and float experiment and the learning how to make a wave. This experiment was probably the trickiest to conduct.

What made it tricky? The hard part is air containment. Just trying to keep the air in the balloon made this experiment a STEM experiment at my house.

STEM Activities

Creating Our Boat

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We created our boat by using a hole punch to create a hole in the side of a plastic frozen dinner container. It was a challenge getting the punch to slip over the lip, but we finally got it done.

Then we placed a straw in a fun balloon with polka dots that had been inflated a few times. (Pre-stretching the balloon made it easier to inflated during the experiment.)

The straw was attached to the balloon with electrical tape. (I think any type of tape that is waterproof would do.)

The end of the straw not attached to the balloon was placed through the hole in the dinner container.

Preparing the STEM Activities

The experiment space we used for our experiment was an under the bed plastic box with water. If you have baby pool or even a larger pool, your boat will travel much farther than our boat did.

We conducted our experiment outside. If you choose to do your STEM activities inside you will want to place plastic tablecloth under your plastic experiment container.

We filled the plastic box about half with water. (I wanted it to be light enough for me to dump the water out of the box when we were finished.)

Ready for the Tricky Part

The end of the balloon was pinched shut after it was inflated. Despite pinching the end, air did start to slip out of the balloon.

Here are some ways we tried to keep the air in the balloon:

Hold a finger over the end of the straw.
Place tape over the end of the straw.
Bend the straw to create a kink in it.
Pinch the balloon above where the balloon meets the straw.

We ultimately decide the pinching above the straw worked best for us. You may decide one of these other ways works best for you.

Going Forwards and Backwards

It was really fun to learn that the boat will go forwards if you place boat down with the straw in the back. When you turn the boat around, it will travel backwards.

Watching the boat being propelled by air either way is really fun!