Paper Airplanes

We have a lot of different interests in our classroom that can be very spontaneous. Today was one of those days where an interest popped up and we flew with it... Literally! Some of the children decided to try their hands at making paper airplanes. It started off with grabbing whatever paper they could find and trying to fold it in different ways to figure out what works. Some succeeded and some didn't at their first attempts but that didn't stop them from wanting to make them better. The children decided to approach the professionals (teachers) for some guidance on how to make the perfect plane. We grabbed some plain white paper and got to work. I got a group together and step by step I showed them a good design in which to fold their paper to make it fly far and high. A few of us thought it would be cool to tie an elastic band through the bottom of our planes to give them extra speed on takeoff. Once we all had our planes folded and ready we started our test flights in the classroom, with all of them being successful and most flying straight across the room we thought it would be best to move our flying outside. We gathered our planes and off we went to our playground where we climbed to the top of the hill for maximum height and one by one they all took off flying up, down and all different directions. It helped that there was a nice breeze outside to give them that extra push to fly higher or longer and they kept going and going. During this time it occurred to us that after a few too many hard landings the noses on our planes were getting squished and they weren't flying very well. So, we would stop and straighten out as best we could then continue on our paper plane journey! Because most of their paper planes looked the same the children decided that they would like to decorate and change the way they were folded to experiment with different flight paths and so we knew who's was who's! To be continued.......

Written By: Mr . Reimer 👨🏼