Archery Challenges for Kids: Cut The Rope

Ever since my 7 year old daughter told me that she wanted to make Archery Videos for Youtube – we’ve been trying to come up with fun ideas for both instructional videos as well challenges that we could do together.

In this installment of Natalie’s Archery Adventures, we decided to repurpose the old “Cut The Rope” Challenge. You’ve probably seen it done a million times on TV, mostly done with a bullet and a gun. The idea is to send a projectile down range and cut a piece of rope.

I know with absolute certainty that I couldn’t split a rope at 20 yards with my bow. I’m also pretty sure that my 7 year old couldn’t do it at a closer distance. The question became, how do we make this challenge possible for the both of us?

Modify The Rope

Just because the challenge is called “Cut The Rope”, it doesn’t mean that we have to stand hard and fast on the definition of Rope. The premise remains the same if we use something such as tape.

What I did was take a strip of blue painters tape and double it up. I put the sticky side of one strip against the sticky side of a second strip. This gave us a sort of wide and flat rope – if you will.

Because I felt like I would have a much easier time hitting the rope, I made mine two strips wide – doubling up each strip. This meant that, in theory, I would have to hit my rope twice as many times as Natalie would have to hit hers.

In order to give the rope some resistance, we needed to add weight to the bottom. Originally I was going to try and find some scrap pieces of 2×4 to use but we had a case of bottled water in the clubhouse. One bottle on the bottom of each rope seemed adequate.

Shooting The Rope

We started off with me shooting 20 yards and Natalie shooting 10 yards. After a few ends, she began to get frustrated. She was having a hard time hitting the two-inch wide strip of tape and I could see that she wasn’t as excited as she was at the beginning of the challenge. We took a quick break to bring her rope closer – putting it at 5 yards.

After a few more ends. I came to the realization that this challenge was taking forever. I could see that my rope was close to splitting in half but it may take a few more ends of shooting. I decided to add a second bottle of water to Natalie’s rope – thinking that the added weight would help tear the tape as she poked holes into it with her arrows.

As you’ll see in the video, Natalie punched two beautiful holes into the top water bottle and made quite a mess on the floor. After another break to mop up the puddle, we got back to shooting.

One end, while retrieving arrows, I hear Natalie yell up in triumph that her water bottle had fallen to the floor. It happened as she was pulling her arrow out of the target. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the camera on to see the long challenge come to an end.

Modifications to the Challenge

I think that on the surface, our Cut The Rop Challenge worked out very well – although it went on much longer than anticipated. In an effort to speed things up next time, I’m going to use a heavier weight for the end of the rope.

I’m thinking that something like a piece of 4×4 would work nicely (and it wouldn’t make a mess if accidentally hit with an arrow)