Natural Ice Boats

When I first saw ice boats made with drinking straws and paper sails, I knew my kids would love them.  But since we wanted to float them on a lake, I had to come up with a way to make them that wouldn't leave litter behind.


I started with a muffin tin and used pipe cleaners and tape to hold a stick in each cup.

Then we filled them with water.  The water expands a little as it freezes so we made sure to put the pipe cleaners high enough.

The hardest part was finding room in the freezer waiting for them to freeze.

We took them to the lake and found some leaves to use as sails.  Everything started great:

Then after about 15 seconds, this is what happened:

Oops.  So we made some new ones using bigger containers:

The second round was MUCH better!!

The kids loved it and want to do it again.

The book we read before we took our boats to the lake was The Little Boat.  A boy on a beach makes a little boat from a piece of polystyrene and a stick and plays with it all day.  The little boat is blown away from him and floats for a long time over the sea, braving storms and hungry fish.  Eventually the little boat lands on a beach where it is found by a little girl who plays with it all day, just as the little boy did.  The story is simple, but is written in such a beautiful way that it reads like a long poem.