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

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.

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.

We started by taping together two paper plates.

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

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

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

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!

And it worked!!

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.