Under the sea battleship craft

Battleships is an old favourite, everyone knows it and everyone plays it. Submarine Day is upon us, so to celebrate, we came up with a funky DIY version of the game as a battleship craft, using a yellow submarine and some other very fishy little characters. :-)

Materials:

• 8 or 16 good sized stones (preferably matching sizes in pairs),
• Deco pens, glitter glue, paints and anything else you want to decorate your stones with,
• 2/3 sheets of paper or card,
• Sellotape,
• A foldable or 2 chess boards. You can get a foldable chess board from Amazon; including these from House of Marbles, or this one here.
• BluTack.

Method:

1. Wash your stones in water and dry them off. Set up some newspaper or scrap paper on the surface you are going to paint them on, so it doesn’t get messy! When they are dry, lay them out and pair them up. This will give you your two sets of ‘battleships’.

2. Decorate your underwater battleships anyway you want. Make sure you include a submarine though, as this is the theme for our post. We went for a Yellow submarine of course. Acrylic paints work well, as do glass and porcelain pens. Glitter glue is a must! ;-)

Here’s some ideas for how to decorate the stones for your battleship craft:

• Submarine,
• Pirate ship/boat,
• Seaweed/coral,
• Octopus or other sea creatures,
• Ships’ wheel,
• Diver,
• Nemo and Dory, and
• Shells.

As you can see we had a lot of fun decorating all of our “battleships”….

3. When you’re done, leave them to dry and set up your battleships board. A chess board, or other squared games board works well. If you have a foldable one, you can sellotape a few pieces of paper together and slot it into the gap where the hinges are. You can even make it into your own watery scene, just as we have done here. If you are using two boards, slot a piece of cardboard between them so no-one can cheat ;-) You can also use chalk to draw a board on the ground, or make one out of paper. If you do this, you can mark where you want to put your battleships on your side of the paper screen.

4. When you’re done split the pairs of stones, and you’re ready to play! You can use BluTack to pin the squares the other player has correctly guessed. If you aren’t sure how to play, then do check out these battleship instructions.

You might also want a piece of paper to keep track of where you have already guessed your opponents stones are as well; just in case your memory is as bad as mine ;-)

We hope you like this idea, it’s perfect for a rainy day, and shouldn’t take too long to make either. Another amazing rainy day idea is our design your own board game too.

We have lots of other great ocean-themed activities for you too, including making a snorkel mask to continue with the under sea theme. If neither of these is to your liking, why not take a look at our collection of ocean activities as well?

This post is part of a Submarine blog hop – so please do nip over to the other posts that are featuring these fabulously, fun vehicles! And if you’d like to join in, come and link up your posts too below. We hope you like our submarine battleship craft, and all the others too.

Here are all the other great submarine ideas for you too:

• Adventures of Adam shares a brilliant Plastic Egg Submarine idea,
• A great Submarine Pretend Play Periscope idea from Peakle Pie,
• Try making a Yellow Submarine Collage inspired by Witty Hoots,
• Pray Species shares an interesting idea with their Submarine Preschool Fun with Foam,
• Brain Power Boy makes some Perler Beads Submarines that look great and are a super craft too!
• The Truck that Wanted to Be a Submarine is a lovely class book review from Kelly’s Classroom,
• Play and Learn Everyday make and explore a Submarine in a Bottle!
• An Easy Submarine for Kids to Make sounds like amazing fun from The Usual Mayhem, and
• Little Bins for Little Hands explore some wonderful Submarine Science!

We have loads of other ideas for crafts on the site too, alongside this blog hop, so why not check them out, as well as following the blog and our Activities Pinterest board as well?

This post was written by Zoe Kelly, the daughter of one of my friends, when she spent a day working with me for her work experience. She did all the craft, and most of the pictures herself, with only a little tweaking here and there from myself. Who said the youff of today weren’t creative? Don’t you just love the internet….

The post also contains affiliate links.

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