What Floats Your Boat?

Have you ever wondered how such heavy objects such as boats or jet skis can float in the water? How no water gets inside?
Or how people can sit inside a boat and it not be too heavy?

Well, the Laduybugs spent the morning exploring this concept by using materials such as popsicle sticks and aluminum foil to create boats that would be able to float in water!

Each child was given as many popsicle sticks as they wanted, and a few pieces of aluminum foil to start and very quickly they all started to brainstorm what made a boat strong enough and safe enough to be in the water.

"I need glue to put the sticks together to make a floor for my boat"

"I'm putting these things on the side like bumpers to keep the water out"

"Look, my boat has ears like Shrek"

"I'm going to make this nice and strong here so it doesn't break"

"I'm going to make mine into a jet ski!"

 Once the boats and jet skis were ready to go, we moved on to the fun part... the children got to put their boat to the test by adding rocks inside to see if it was strong enough to stay afloat!

We started with smaller, lighter weighted rocks and slowly added more and more to see how far we could push it. By the end, some children had their whole pile of rocks safely inside without the boat sinking!

​"This rock is nice and light, so it will float"

"I think it will sink because that rock is SOOOO heavy"

"Let's see if this boat works, I put stuff under this one to make a floor"

"Isn't that cool? I used up ALL my rocks and it still floats"

 As we tested the boats in the water, we discussed what worked and what didn't work with some of the designs and brainstormed what we thought made a good boat and from our experiment we came up with the following:

1. Boats work better when they have a strong structure for the floor,
it helps keep the heavy objects secure

2. Boats need to have high enough sides so that water doesn't
pour over into the boat causing it to flood

3. Absolutely NO holes will be able to be along the bottom of the
boat near the water, or else it fills with water and sinks

4. With a good structure, boats can hold a lot of weight.
Some of the boats we tested had SO many rocks on it and it didn't.

What a great activity to kick off the summer season...
Who else is ready to test this theory on a real boat this summer? We sure are!

- Amberly