DLTK's Crafts for Kids
Tugboat Paper Craft

Contributed by Leanne Guenther

This tugboat is a simple cut and paste paper craft with simple pieces that is easy for young children to make.

A tugboat ("tug") is a boat that pushes or tows other things in the water. Tugs move vessels that either should not move themselves, such as boats in a narrow canal, or those that cannot move by themselves, such as barges or broken ships. The tugboats I'm most used to seeing are the ones that pull big groups of logs floating on the water from the forest where they are cut down to the mill where they are chopped into the wood we use for houses, furniture and fences!

Materials:

• a printer,
• paper,
• B&W version: some crayons, paint, markers or pencil crayons
• scissors,
• glue

Craft Instructions:

• Optional: Sometimes if doing the project with a group, instead of providing the paper template pieces to the kids, I will make cardboard tracers that they can use. To do this:
  • print out the black and white template and cut out (or you can hand draw your own pieces)
  • adult traces these pieces onto a piece of cardboard (old cereal boxes or the cardboard backs of paper pads work well)
  • provide these cardboard templates to the children for them to trace onto construction paper.

• Print out the craft template of choice.
  
  I always prefer the B&W version but sometimes kids want a color version, especially if they're making the craft as part of a bigger project (for example, it can be fun to arrange the tugboat as part of a bigger scene on a bulletin board -- pulling another boat with some tissue paper waves/water, clouds and handprint sun in the sky, triangle evergreen trees.
• Color (if using the black and white version of the craft) and cut out the template pieces. If you are coloring this particular craft, I think it's a good one to use something like water color paint or fingerpaints.
• You can assemble your tugboat however you like it!  It doesn't have to be just like mine, but here are the steps to how I did it.
  • Put the three large circles along the bottom of the tugboat.
  • Put the smaller circles in the center of each of the large circles to make "portholes".
  • Glue the small rectangle across the smokestack on the top of the tugboat.
  • Glue the long skinny rectangle across the widest part of the tugboat.
  • Glue the three square windows across the rectangular part of the tugboat.

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP in most browsers).

Template 1     color   or   B&W

Template 2     color   or   B&W