Whether you are camping in the jungle while on a research expedition, trying to secure parts for an experiment in a lab, or any of thousands of other possibilities – knots are VERY useful to know.

For this activity, you will need:
6 pieces of thin rope, about 18″ long each (about 9 feet total)
2 different colored tapes
1 piece of dowel
1 piece of cardboard

The first step is to assemble your practice board.
To do so:
Cut your cardboard to be about 3 inches wide and 8 inches long.
Punch pairs of holes along the length of the cardboard as in the image below.

Next, you need to prepare your rope.
To do so:
Cut the rope into 18″ long pieces.
For each piece wrap each end in a different color tape.  You can see the white and black ends of our ropes in the image below.  Many “How to tie knots” books and websites will use different colored ends to help you tell which side of the rope to use when tying the knot.

Now thread each rope piece through a pair of the holes in your knot board.  We suggest you put the same colored ends all on the same side of the board.

Next, you need to learn a little vocabulary.

• Bend – When you join two ropes together.
• Bight – a “U” shape in your rope
• Hitch – When you attach a rope to something else.
• Loop –
• Standing End – The end of the rope you are not actively using.
• Standing Part – The length of rope between the Standing End and where you are working to make a knot.
• Tail or Working End – The end of the rope you are working with to make a knot.

Now you are ready to start!  We suggest starting with the overhand knot and the half hitch. These two knots are used in many other knots and they are useful on their own!  Both are on the top row of our sample board, using the dark blue rope.

For our sample board, we also used the overhand knot to secure the right hand side of our yellow, purple, and red ropes so they wouldn’t pull back out of the board.

You’ll find links below to websites that specialize in teaching how to tie knots.  For each knot, we have two links.  Pick the one that works best for you. They both have lots of good information about when to use the different knots.

Overhand Knot (right side of our dark blue rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Half Hitch (left side of our dark blue rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Two Half Hitches (yellow rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Clove Hitch (purple rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Square Knot (pink rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Sheet Bend (light blue rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots

Bowline (red rope)
101 Knots or Animated Knots