Boy it’s been windy here these past few weeks. We’ve had clear, bright, sunny autumn days, but the wind has been crazy!
Wild windy days always make my kids crazy too. They can’t seem to sit still and when they go outside into the blustery weather they run around like a pack of nutbags and do all kinds of silly things!
To rein in the crazies and take advantage of the sunny but windy days I challenged my boys to make something that would take advantage of the wild windiness.
We made these cool super swishy flying rockets!
For such an easy kids craft, these rockets turned out to be really fun to make and even more fun play with!
Here’s what you’ll need to make a super swishy flying rocket:
- Our rocket template (see below to download) or draw your own.
- Some card or the side of an old cereal box.
- Something to colour your rocket with – paint, markers or crayons.
- Streamers in firey colours
- Scissors
- Glue
- A hole punch
- String
- A stick
You’ll need to print or draw your rocket onto some stiff card so it will fly well.
We didn’t have any cardboard that would go through our printer so we printed the rocket template onto plain paper and then glued it onto the side of an empty cereal box before cutting it out.
We used liquid water colours and cotton buds to paint our rockets, fluro crepe paper streamers left over from a birthday party, and a bamboo garden stake for the stick.
You can design your own rocket, or you can use our free printable rocket template.
You can download the rocket template here.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. If you are printing on US ‘letter sized’ paper be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
Once you’ve got all your supplies together it’s time to work on the rocket.
Cut out your rocket design and fill it with colour. You’ll need to make sure you colour/draw on both sides of the cardboard so your rocket looks great from both sides.
Once you’ve coloured your rocket you need to glue the streamers onto the bottom.
We chose fluro red, yellow, orange and pink streamers so it would look like a burst of flames shooting out the end of our rockets!
Leave the streamers nice and long so they make a wild and swishy ‘tail’.
Cut a piece of string around 30cms long and punch a hole in the top of your rocket.
Tie one end of the string to the rocket and the other to the end of your stick. Wrap a piece of sticky tape around the string and the stick to stop it slipping if you need to.
Now your rocket is ready to fly!
These little rockets swish around super fast if there is a bit of wind outside or even if you just twirl them around, and they make an awesome rushing sound that we think sounds just like super sonic rocket boosters!
They are so much fun to swirl and swish and fly around!
These rockets turned out to be so much fun that we busy thinking of new designs. Perhaps some swishy swirly flying butterflies, or birds!
What do you think?
If you’ve got a great of for what we should make next leave a comment and let me know, your idea might just feature in our next post!
Karen says
this is AWESOME. We made one during school holidays ( very windy in Tasmania at the moment) and it is great, VERY swishy and my son loves it!! really great fun to make too, thank you
Sarah-Jane says
Thank you. One of my DCK’s brought in a book to share with us today about a Rocket and this activity made a perfect extension idea to make afterwards. The kids loved it.