Flight and Air Unit Study Ideas

This week we started a unit study of flight. Of course, to study flight, one needs to understand air so we will be covering air, too.

(My daughter and my dad about to take-off)

Books:
1. Captain Arsenio: Inventions and (mis)adventures in flight
2. Fred and Ted Like to Fly
3. Gilberto and the Wind
4. Race for the Sky: the Kitty Hawk Diaries of Johnny Moore
5. The Little Airplane
6. Good-bye, Charles Linderbergh
7. The Flyers
8. Clorinda Takes Flight
9. Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle
10. Wee and the Wright Brothers
11. The Paper Airplane Book
12. The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Lois Bieriot
13. The Hallelujah Flight
14. Joe-Joe's First Flight
15. Ruth Law Thrills a Nation
16. Fly, Bessie, FLy
17. Nobody Owns the Sky
18. Flight of the Dodo
19. The Magic School Bus Takes Flight
20. How People Learned to Fly
21. Our Neighbor is a Strange, Strange Man
22. The Wright Brothers
23. Today I Will Fly
24. As the Crow Flies: A First Book of Maps
25. Let's Fly a Kite
26. Touching the Sky: The Flying Adventures of Wilbur and Orville Wright
27. The Best Winds
28. Curious George Flies a Kite
29. A Picture Book of Amelia Earhart
30. The Emporer and the Kite
31. Fly High!: The Story of Bessie Coleman
32. Night Flight: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic
33. We Like Kites
34. The Kite Festival
35. The Story of Kites

Science Experiments:
1. Making a parachute with a plastic bag (air resistance)
2. Blowing paper under and over your lips (air flow and lift)
3. A wing's cross-section made from paper and tape (lift)
4. Force's in flight using your body to show thrust (running), drag (running), and lift (jumping)
5. Air movement: use wax paper, straws, breath, and colored water to show air flow
6. Make a pinwheel with paper and a pencil (wind)
7. Make paper gliders, pinwheels, helicopters, etc out of different weighted papers

Hand Writing Exercises:
1. Plane Terms Bingo (make a word list, make a bingo card, have your child wright out their bingo card)
2. Label plane parts of homemade paper airplanes
3. Write family members to ask them if they've flown on an airplane
4. Play "Hang-Airplane" (instead of drawing a hangman, draw an airplane) on a window, mirror, paper, etc

Math Exercises:
1. If you're near a flight path, count airplanes in the sky
2. Throw balloons in the air and see how high the child can count before it falls (or backwards count)
3. Time how long it takes for your parachutes to hit the ground and record times on a graph
4. Dissect a plane to find hidden shapes
5. Make several paper airplanes in different colored papers and make different patterns with them
6. If you happen to be near an airport, time and record how long it takes one to leave the ground

Social Studies: (Using the books from the above list:)
1. Talk about big topics like race and gender, imagination and vision, hard-work and team-efforts
2. Discuss different time periods and the technology available, the clothes worn, etc.