How to Make a Rocket Out of a Paper Towel Tube

Video Transcript

"I'm Miss Nancy. I'm an elementary school teacher, and a mother of three down here in Tampa, Florida. And today, we are going to learn how to make a rocket out of a paper towel tube. You're going to need that paper towel tube, a pair of scissors, some tape, a piece of construction paper -- maybe a few pieces in case you want to decorate it -- and some markers. First thing that we're going to do is figure out how big our paper towel tube is so that we can make the construction paper match. And it looks like we have about an extra inch here, so we're going to cut along that extra inch to get rid of it. Now, remember, if you've got little kids, you're going to want to have them use safety scissors instead of the real scissors. You just don't want to...make sure that they don't cut themselves. But that gives us a good idea of how big our rocket's going to be. Now, let's take a piece of tape and wrap our paper towel in this tape. First, it'll help to just tape it right to the paper towel. Unlike Christmas gifts, you're allowed to actually tape it to your project, so I'll tape it right to that paper towel to secure it. And now, we'll wrap it. So we've got one wrapped paper towel tube. And then we're going to tape that. And now, we'll get to the fun part. We're going to cut four relatively even sized cuts along the bottom, just straight up and down. Relatively evenly spaced. And that'll give us the base of our rocket ship. Bend them out like that at the same length each way. So that way, our rocket ship can stand up. Here we go. Now, we have some pieces of construction paper that we've cut to look like the base of the rocket. Just triangles -- just plain, ordinary triangles. I'm going to take our tape, and once again, secure it right to the tube just like that. And again, with the other triangle. Whoops. There we go. So it's making one big triangle on the back, and I'll show you why in just a second. There we go. Because that gives us the wings on the back of our rocket. Now, to make the top of the rocket. Could you hand me that red paper, please? To make the top of the rocket, we're going to cut a rectangle and roll it over into itself, so we're making a cone. So it's tiny at the top and large at the bottom. There we go. There we go. And once again, securing it with tape. Now, of course, you can use markers and crayons as well. And that way, when you let the balloon go, your rocket will fly. Not very good."