Get ready for adventure and race by boat, plane, and car.
This is a great mini-adventure for kids (and parents) who like to build! Create homemade cars, planes, and boats and then head outdoors for a high-adrenaline race by road, air and stream. Whose paper plane or wooden raft will win!?
This adventure can be stretched out over a few afternoons, or build your vessels during the week and hold a weekend race day.
No matter how hard I threw it, it just wouldn’t fly….
The vehicles
Each competitor must create 3 vehicles; a boat, an aeroplane, and a car
Any materials acceptable – a lego car, a paper aeroplane, a raft built with sticks and string…(no plastic in the water in case the boat is lost)
We opted for a ‘motorised’ vehicle ban – no remote controls!
Bonus points for decoration and ingenuity
Find instructions online for origami planes and boats if needed
A collection of planes, cars and boats
The race
Choose your race locations; we chose a field with a hill for the planes, a quiet, steep country lane for the cars; and a little local stream for the boats
Draw up a leadership board to take with you and mark down the results of each race. We awarded points for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place in each race
For the planes and cars, the winner was the vehicle that travelled the furthest
For the boat race, we set a start and a finish line and timed each individual boat from start to finish. The winner was the fastest
Once all the race results were logged, we tallied up the points and crowned our winner
*Make sure you bring all materials back home with you and the end.
I’m not normally much of a builder or crafter but we all really enjoyed taking part, building our vehicles and seeing which were the best…. and the worst (usually mine!) It was highly competitive and there were a few attempts at sabotage and cheating (usually me!)
Preparation list
Discuss how you would like to make the vehicles so everyone has an idea of what they’re doing
Collect any materials needed – we collected sticks and leaves for our rafts and planes
Find a good origami site if you want to make paper planes and boats
Build your vehicles. Small hands tend to need a lot of help….
Decorate any paper entries and give them all a good race names like ‘The Shredder’
Choose your race locations (as close together as possible so you can walk between them)
The results table …. (a little grubby after a day out)
Kit list
Homemade vehicles
A bag to carry them all in
Race scorecard and pen
Snacks… it’s a high adrenaline activity and snacks might be needed when races are lost (especially when lost to siblings)
