Flight Camp Update

Great printable stuff here at Social Studies in Flight! I like it because it is information with assessments built in. Plus, great pictures! I am probably going to do just the History of Flight section.

I think we will focus on fundamental forces of flight (lift, gravity, drag, and thrust) and then move into the flight degrees of movement (pitch, roll, and yaw). Found a great idea for demonstrating this (building a clay airplane and using skewers), here.

White Knight (the minivan) broke down over the weekend, so it's a good thing we planned to stay home and use this as our research day! I am hoping it will be fixed by tomorrow so we can do the field trips more easily.

The Emperor will be on Summer Vacation in just four...more...days...

UPDATE:
We ended up showing pitch, roll, and yaw by "flying" Choclo and Oob. We skipped the skewers. Everyone wanted me to "fly" them, but I took the better part of valor and had them pretend to be airplanes while I called out directions. This sparked a a good discussion of how the added dimensions of air flight made control of a plane much more difficult than earlier forms of transportation.

While discussing the history of flight, we got off on a discussion of the Hindenberg, which led to talking about hydrogen and helium, relative lightness (helium does not weigh less than nothing, it weighs less than air) and their positioning on the Periodic Table. They are next to each other in order, but opposite in location because one is reactive and the other inert. I barely managed to restrain myself from launching into an explanation of electron shells (because the set up of the shells are the only thing that make it all make sense). I always wonder if these digressions end up being helpful connections which make sense of the world or unhelpful distractions which mean we never finish a topic.