Air and Space

 September really is the time to hit the big Smithsonian museums without the crowds.  Last week we went to Air and Space, something we skipped last year.

We had to touch the moon rock, of course!

And we always love their hands on demonstrations of the principles of flight.

Here Zorg and Leena are helping to demonstrate how the airfoil shape helps provide lift.


 And we had fun in their little Cessna.


Actually, we had a LOT of fun in their Cessna.

It's one of the few times we've been there where there wasn't a line waiting for turns.


We did some space stuff, too.  We went through the Skylab at least twice (some of us more). 

Klenda, Zorg and Leena found a docent with parts of real space suits who enjoyed chatting with them about how everything worked.

One of the nice things about being home schooled is that you can be interested and ask questions.  My experience in school was pretty different.

All the docent/reenactors/museum people I've seen love to talk to people who are genuinely interested, and, since there weren't many people around, the Zoomlians got to ask as many questions as they wanted.

They left the docent with a big smile!

We also saw the new (to us) exhibit on navigation.  They started with sextants, and went up through GPS - it was a fascinating exhibit!

Flight Wrap Up

This little mini unit was a ton of fun and a good reminder to me that it isn't very much work to make one.

Klenda built a rubber band-propeller driven plane and Mxyl built a "rip cord" helicopter. Both actually flew!

Leena and Zorg built air pressure rockets and had a great time racing them with different payloads.

All four of these were from very nice kits that Mumpy had bought for them over a year ago. I tend to get cool stuff and then stash it away until I hit the right combination of ages and topics.

We never got to the Aviation Museum (Mxyl hurt his knee the morning we were to have gone), but Air and Space was fantastic!

We got there at 10, before things got crowded. Even the little guys were fascinated by all the hands on exhibits.

Choclo and Oob loved the plane best of all. You could see the ailerons and elevators move as they steered.

Here is Leena doing the Bernoulli experiment.


Klenda got to help with a paper airplane experiment.

Then everyone got to do the paper airplane contest!




An amazing time was had by all!

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.

Flight Camp

Next week is Flight Camp! Now, by "camp," I actually mean a short but intensive focus on flight. For four days we will live and breathe the subject.

Day 1: Intro to flight. We'll be looking at some carefully selected books (carefully selected by Bill who noticed we were doing Flight Camp). We'll do the Bill Nye "Flight" episode as well as the relevant Brain Pop movies. We will also do a packet that includes many of these. In the afternoon I am hoping to do some amazing paper airplanes.

Day 2: We will pop on down to the Air and Space Museum for their excellent How Things Fly exhibit. After a year of touring museums, it's the most comprehensive hands on exhibit I've ever seen about anything. In the afternoon we will start building some (hopefully) working models that I stashed away when the kids were too young to do them.

Day 3: The College Park Aviation Museum - a lovely small hands on museum with a ton of imagination and a plane you can climb into. And aviator scarves, helmets, and goggles! I love this place!! I am hoping we can finish the build projects in the afternoon and start flying.

Day 4: Clean the entire house and then make a trip to BWI to watch planes take off and land (there is a nifty little museum featuring a cut up jet on the Observation Deck). While we are there we will pick up an actual person who has really flown in on a plane... a very favorite friend!

I wonder how I would have home schooled before the internet. I totally take for granted that I can Google a week's worth of fabulous lessons on practically any subject (with worksheets and You Tube videos) in less than a minute. Is this being lazy or resourceful? I can remember before the internet. I can remember before e mail. I remember computers without mouses. I can even remember typewriters!!!