Since we were at the lake, and we live in the land of 10,000 Lakes it was a no brainer that Tuesday would be focused on water.

H₂O Tuesday Craft

I wish I could take the creative credit for this genius activity. But I have to give a shout out to Jodi at kidsactivitiesblog.com. We made Pool Noodle Lightsabers. It was fairly simple, but they needed the supplies prepared for them. My sister and my mother and I  were able to help each of the boys in the assembly, so when we went to the pool they would each have one.

The materials we used to make the lightsabers were:

I used glowsticks instead of flashlights, like Jodi did at kidsactiviesblog.com. I figured they were able to go in the water and were lighter than dropping the whole flashlight into the pool noodle.

The first step in creating the lightsaber was to make the handle. That is what the duct tape was for. You could cut the pool noodles to make them smaller and more manageable as actual lightsabers but knowing that pool noodles appearing offers all kids the opportunity to hit the other, I figured we could justify the hitting by making full size lightsabers.

This is Auntie B’s gig; I enable the shenanigans.

My middle and younger nephews did the regular lightsaber with the handle at the bottom.  With help from my sister and mom, we cut the duct tape strips and they wrapped them. We also made sure to wrap the hole at the bottom of the noodle for later. The oldest wanted to make a double ended lightsaber like Kylo Ren. He wrapped his duct tape in the middle.

The next step was to create the black accents with the electrical tape. It was three stripes toward the top of the handle on the regular lightsabers that wrapped around the noodle followed by two vertical one-inch strips about an 1.5” from the bottom. With the double ended it was one strip wrapped around the light saber at each end of the duct tape and then about three inches toward the middle of the light saber from each of those strips there were two strips wrapped around each.

The final step was to let them crack the glow sticks and drop them in the open hole at the end. We taped up the hole with a few strips of duct tape to keep them from falling out. We also had to put a few on the untapped end of the double-edged lightsaber. 

Voila!

We were ready for lightsaber battles in the lake or pool!

H₂O Tuesday Game

I did a classic water game first with the boys for the H₂O Tuesday game. It was another riff on games I stole from Britni at Play, Party, Plan who has many great ideas for water games. I didn’t want to have to bring a lot of gear up to cabin, so instead of using a sponge to transfer water or buckets to transfer water from a kiddie pool to another kiddie pool, I scaled it down and had the boys transfer a bowl of water using cups to an empty bowl of water. The rules were simple. Fill the cup, run and dump it and return. As soon as one boy was back, the other could run their cup and dump it in the bowl. We timed them going one way, and then the next.

When that lost its fun, we played Roll Six and Splash. Basically, it is a game to get the younger boys to learn their numbers. It is so easy. I filled a cake pan with water and then gave them a large die to roll. If they rolled a six, they got to splash in the pan.

H₂O Tuesday Activity

Our H₂O Tuesday activity was called Walking Water.  In theory, this should have been a fairly cool science experiment, and we did get some results—it just took longer than we were ready for.

I liked starting before the experiment with forming a hypothesis about what colors would be made in the empty jars when the dye transferred. The older boy knew what would happen, but the four-year-old was trying to figure it out, which was a great learning moment.

Once that was done, we set up our experiment.

We went outside to complete the test to make sure that we didn’t get dyed water all over the cabin.

We put the cups on the ground and filled the glasses with water. Then we let the boys add drops of food coloring to three. A red cup, a blue cup, and a yellow cup.

We put these cups in a circle with an empty glass of water in between.

Next, we took a paper towel and rolled it into a “snake.” We connected that from the red cup to the empty cup next to it. We repeated the process with another paper towel to connect the empty jar to the yellow cup. We connected the yellow to the empty glass next to blue and that empty glass to the blue glass.  We finally completed the circle by linking the blue and the empty glass between it and red.

Then we waited. This was the part where we maybe should have done something else in between, but they could start to watch the water creep up the paper towels and start to mix the colors.

H₂0 Tuesday Snack

While we waited for the transfer to really get moving, we had our snack. Again, a really easy one! I bought them each their own little carton of Goldfish crackers at Target. They are always a hit as an afternoon nosh and took no preparation!

When the book was done and the Goldfish gone—for the moment. We wrapped up Cousin Camp 2023 by testing out the Pool Noodle lightsabers at the beach.