Make an Avocado Boat for Fun Water Play

This Avocado Boat craft is a perfect complement to water play, imaginative play and also explores the concept of sinking and floating. (Plus it’s perfect if your household is filled with voracious avocado eaters like ours!)

Supplies:

Avocado skin
Paint
Origami paper
Straws
Tape (washi or plain)
Scissors

Instructions:

Step 1: Firstly, eat your avocado – yum, yum. Scrape all the flesh out and wash the inside of the avocado. We left ours to dry for 4 days. Once dried out, paint the inside of your avocado.

Step 2: The straws will form your mast. Make 3 cuts in the bottom of the straw to create a fan-like base.
Step 3: Choose your “sails.” We folded a square piece of origami in half, to create triangles. We then folded this triangle in half again to create a smaller triangle. Cut along the fold.

Step 4: We taped our sail to the straw. You could also use a hole punch and punch a hole in the top and bottom of the sail and then thread the sail through. Tape the 3 “legs” of the straw into the boat. (Using a hot glue gun would probably do the trick as well.)

Step 5: We used bendy straws. Initially I thought that we could just tape the bent part of the straw into the avocado, but the mast didn’t always bear weight well in this scenario. At this stage, you engage in a great trial and error process trying to find the point at which the mast will balance.
(I wasn’t actually anticipating this activity to take such a scientific turn- but lots of great discussion opportunities around buoyancy, sinking and floating.) We discovered that you need to stick the mast slightly towards one end of the boat with the sail pointing towards the other end of the boat.

Step 6: Play time! Fill a water play table or wading pool with water and sail your boats! We had varying success with each boat.

We used Hass and Shepard avocados and discovered that the more bulbous nature of the Hass was more conducive to this activity. (The random things you learn, hey? #thestoryofmum.)

Excuse me now whilst I scour the fridge for other vegetables we can turn into modes of transport. Enjoy!

Are you any good at Science-y stuff? It’s definitely not my strong point!

More crafts the kids will love:

Images: Oh Creative Day. This craft tutorial first appeared on Oh Creative Day.