Important tip for a flat yard: The best placement for an SNS is on a gentle downhill slope that peters out at the end to flat, but not all of us are lucky enough to have the perfect sliding real estate. Use your regular hose to feed water into it and you’ve got a perfect shower down your slide. For a little more money, pick up a 50-foot sprinkler hose and (if you also got the extra roll of Velcro) affix it to the side of the slide down one of the berms.
Or if you have one or more lawn sprinklers, use those. If you’re keeping it simple, just make sure you have a little slope and start running a hose at the top of the slide at the higher end (where you’ll start your slides from).
Last thing we need is the water source. Flip it over, and you should have what looks a little like a very long, very narrow emergency slide from an airliner. Once you’re done, you have the underside of your slide. Do this for all the noodles until you have a berm all the way around the perimeter of your slide. Attach a 2-inch strip of the Velcro to the plastic at each end and in the middle of each noodle so that the plastic wraps over and under the noodle and is attached back to itself. This is where you’ll be sticking the Velcro. Pull the plastic over the noodle as if you’re going to wrap it up, and get enough overlap so about an inch of the plastic from the edge touches the plastic on the other side of the noodle toward the middle. Next, starting at one end, take a noodle and lay it on the plastic a few inches in from the outside edge. The standard length of a pool noodle is about 5 feet, so for our 50-foot long slide, we used eight noodles per side with about a foot of spacing, give or take, and then one noodle at either end. You can leave a foot or so between each noodle. Lay the noodles around the perimeter of your plastic. Figure out which side is the top (it’s a completely arbitrary decision since both sides are the same, but you have to pick one and stick with it), and place it facedown. But, depending on your location, you may want a smaller or bigger (yeah!) slide. We tried some 6-mil plastic sheeting, 6 feet wide by 50 feet long for our sample slide, since it gave a nice width of sliding surface, and the length fit across our front yard. To start, take your roll of heavy sheet plastic and lay it out on your yard or other assembly site. And what I came up with is easy to build, hugely fun to play with, durable, and simple to take apart and store for significant reuse. So I started to wonder if there wasn’t something that could be done at home, in the DIY spirit of using garbage bags like I did as a kid, but a bit more durable and, you know, BIGGER. And while I said they were imaginative, they’re usually not that big, since they’re designed for a mass market of people who won’t all have the yard space for a larger slide. 
What I’ve found over a few years with my kids and their friends is that the quality of construction usually makes these slides a one- or two-use product. Heck, you can drop a couple hundred bucks and get giant inflatable water slides that will fill up your whole yard. They’re big, bright, and even imaginative. These days, mass-produced Slip ’n’ Slide–type things are available at any big-box store for around $30. Then turn a sprinkler or two on them, and get busy. We’d usually cut up a number of black garbage bags and try to overlap them to create a good run. When I was a kid, I remember building a homemade Slip ’n’ Slide with my friends to have some outdoor fun on a hot summer day.
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