A book and a project: bottle rocket launcher

I love to find books that have fun projects within the pages to go with them, or even books that we just read that we find a fun activity to do with them on our own. I am hoping to do more of these and share them too!



This particular book is called Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab by Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith. Aric found it at the library last week, and he thought it was really fun that there were science experiments all throughout the book that go along with the story. I'm not even sure if he's read the story yet though. I think he just picked one of the projects that looked interesting to him, and decided he wanted to do it.

All the supplies for his bottle rocket launcher.

He chose to make the bottle rocket launcher. I told him that if he found one that he wanted to make, I would help him find the supplies if they weren't too much. We went down to our local hardware store for these supplies, and a very nice man helped us find all the supplies we needed. I loved that he talked to Aric about it, and gave him some hints. This was all his project, and I think the man at the store thought it was pretty cool that he was making something that he took interest in.

I had to help him with the gluing part as the chemicals are pretty strong for the pvc, but he did all the cutting himself, and he figured out where to put all the pieces. All in all this was a very easy project, and took less than an hour to build. We had fun trying it out at the park when it finally got sunny a few days later. It worked awesome!

This should be a fun new "toy" for all the boys to play with!

P.S. The actual story does look interesting. I read the first few pages! There are a lot of great reviews that say it is a good story too. I think if he wants to do another project I'll have to require him to read the story, ha!