Friday 12 April 2013

How to make a water wheel (& Outdoor Play Party)

Pin It
How to make a water wheel


Welcome to another Outdoor Play Party!  If you've been outdoors playing this week please do link up below.

We've very much been enjoying the warmer weather, it makes it so much easier to get outside, plus we got the opportunity to test out a project Bud has wanted to do for a while - make a water wheel.


Water wheel making with kids

The idea to make a water wheel came after a visit to a local wildlife centre where they'd used a water wheel to power some lights.  We also watched a few YouTube videos suggesting you could use a water wheel to pull up weights and then found this post by Wired.com so decided to see if we could make our own.

steps to making a water wheel with kids

We started by taping together two paper plates.

kids science experiments water wheel

Then we pushed a skewer through the two plates and Champ made sure that the plates could spin round ok.

Making a water wheel with kids

Next we taped plastic cups around the edge of the paper plates.

kids water wheel activity

This is the finished product, the cups were roughly spaced around the edge and I think we used seven cups in total.

teaching kids about water wheels

The idea is that by pouring water into one cup the weight of the water pushes the wheel round and then the next cup fills up and so on.  To get the wheel to lift a weight you can suspend an object on the skewer and watch it wind up, but we were just happy for our wheel to turn!

how to make a water wheel

And it worked!!

making a water wheel

Very happy faces, but also Champ got soaking wet which I think they enjoyed more than the wheel actually working!

I hope you've had fun outdoors this week.  If you have please link up below, doing so gives us permission to share a picture from your post (Pinterest, Facebook etc) with a link back to your site.  Don't forget the link stays up for two weeks so please link back next week too.

We had lots of play ideas linked up last time, my favourite was from my co-host The Golden Gleam a great post about the benefits of outdoor play, worth a read.





6 comments:

  1. Love this - so simple yet so effective - think the look of delight on his face says it all!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a fun activity! I know my kids would love something like that. And what a brave mama to let them play with water on a chilly day .

    You made me smile by featuring my post. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is an AWESOME idea! i hope you come over and link it up at TGIF this week - http://www.123homeschool4me.com/2013/04/tgif-linky-party-72.html =)

    have a great week!!
    Beth =)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Looks like fun for a warmer day! Lol Thanks for sharing at Mom's Library!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great water wheel. This looks perfect for a hot summer day!

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is fab!

    I would love for you to link up at the Mommy Archive - we're focused on all sorts of water play this week, Alice @ Mums Make Lists

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...