How to Make a Walnut Raft

Making walnut rafts with your children is an excellent opportunity to teach your children about buoyancy and drift. We created these rafts as part of our home school adventure. It's a fun project that taught my children a lot.

To make a walnut raft you will need four half shells of walnuts for each raft. Crack your walnuts in half, scrape out the meats and any innards so that you have a nice smooth surface to work with. Go ahead and eat the meats if you like; we won't be using them for this project.

Cut a four-inch by four-inch piece of cardboard. This will be the base of your raft. It doesn't matter if it already has writing on it, because you will have an opportunity to paint over it and decorate it later.

Apply a bit of glue to the ring of each half-walnut shell. Press one of your walnut half-shells onto each of the four corners of your piece of cardboard. Make sure you have all four walnuts on the same side of the cardboard. It should look like a little table. Make sure that you give your glue plenty of time to dry.

If you would like to, you can paint or decorate the top surface of your walnut raft. Just make sure that you remember that the side with the walnuts glued to it is the bottom of the raft. So you would want to decorate the opposite side. Also make sure that you don't put any decorations in the exact center of the raft because that's where we are going to connect the mast.

Take a piece of clay or Play Dough, about the size of a marble, and press it onto the center of your raft. Then take half of a regular drinking straw, (or a shorter straw like a coffee stirrer), and press one end of it into that blob of clay so that the straw sticks straight up.

Next you will need a piece of paper about two inches by two inches square. Punch two holes into it about one third and two thirds of the way down the square, right down the center of it. Then thread it onto your straw. The straw is the mast of your boat and the paper square is your sail.

You can make the sail in whatever color you like. If you make several rafts you might want to give them each different colored sails so you can tell them apart once they are in the water.

Take your walnut rafts to a local river or lake (or to your bathtub!) and practice blowing on the sail to see how you rafts react. Challenge your children to compete with you or with each other to see who can control their raft the most accurately, make it go the fastest, or make it go the farthest.

If you interested in seeing just how far your walnut raft can go, and if you don't mind possibly not getting them back, consider releasing them in a nearby river. You can even write a message or tape a postcard to the base of your raft to go along with it.

If you put a stamped postcard on your raft, whoever finds it may very well mail it back to you with a note about where they found it, that way you can see just how far your walnut raft managed to travel. If you do add any items to your raft make sure they are waterproof or you put them inside a plastic bag to protect them.

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