It’s good for every child to learn to swim, even from around the age of six months to a year. Learning to swim should be fun, and many children absolutely love swimming. Armed with their favorite toys, they can’t wait to get rid of their arm floaties and swim alone.
Keeping up your child’s enthusiasm for something like swimming can be a little difficult. Even when you’re not in the pool, something like a papercraft boat can go a long way towards getting your child interested in swimming, the sea, and sea life.
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Basic Boat Parts
This papercraft boat is fun, simple, and easy to make. You can easily make several in a variety of colors. Putting this boat together is a good way of teaching your child the various parts of a real boat.
However, beware. You should keep this part of the lesson very simple, only sticking to very basic boat parts (hull, sail, mast, flag, and so on). Your kids may well get bored easily if you treat them to an in-depth lesson on the anatomy of ships!
You can also show your kids real life pictures of famous boats and ships and allow them to choose colors based on their favorite. Naming the ship is always a fun part of the creating process!
Make a Paper Sea
Making a paper sea for your boat to sail in is very simple. All you’ll need are long strips of blue or green paper, cut in wiggly lines. Spread these across the floor as the “sea” your kid and their boat can sail in.
If you’ve already made several papercraft creations (a dinosaur and a unicorn, for instance) your child can play with these along with the boat. Make a larger version of the boat, preferably with a longer deck. You can do this by cutting out that section of the papercraft design much larger than it needs to be.
Now, your child’s other papercraft animals can stand on the deck and go sailing across the sea you’ve created!
A Lesson in Sea Life
If your child loves sailing their paper boat on their paper sea, now is a good time to teach them something about what’s beneath the water. Show your child pictures of marine life, such as fish, whales, sharks, seahorses, and more. Sea life is a rich, colorful ecosystem, bound to fascinate any child.
If you’re showing your kids pictures from a book, try tracing some pictures of sea life in the book. Have your child color in the pictures, using the book as a reference. Then cut them out and add them to your paper “sea”. See how much variety you and your child can add!
You could even make rudimentary flash cards, writing the name of each creature on the back of its picture for you kids to refer to later.
Your child is going to love adventuring in their papercraft boat. However, a word of warning – don’t let them take it in the bath!
How to Make a Papercraft Boat
Instructions
Step 1:
Select different colored craft paper for the boat craft. We chose yellow, brown, orange, red, blue and white colored craft papers.
You can trace the template patterns on colored paper of your choice but make sure to trace the small round shape and the boat base shape on the same colored craft paper.
Trace and cut out the patterns nicely.
Step 2:
Stick the small round cutout in the middle of the big round cutout; this is the life preserver ring.
Stick the triangular flag cutout on the small strip, stick the longer string near the bottom side of the boat base; and stick the square cutouts together, with the smaller ones on the top of the big ones; this is the cabin of the boat.
Step 3:
Attach the cabin pattern on the top side of the boat base; keep it near the front side.
Step 4:
Attach the life preserver pattern on the boat base, near the back.
Step 5:
Now, stick the flag to the front side of the boat and the telescope cutout to the top side of the cabin pattern. You can use sharpie to add outlines to the individual parts if you want to.
