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Our current Five in a Row unit is The Glorious Flight. Ben is thoroughly loving this unit, learning all about airplanes and the history of flight. In a few short hours (I really need to get to bed!), we’ll be leaving on a trip to Washington DC. The highlight of that trip will be to see The Air and Space Museum. Ben is so excited he can hardly stand it.
To wet our whistle a bit, we went on a field trip last week with a local homeschool group, to a local small airport. The children were able to explore a couple of small planes, including sitting in the cockpit. Soon, we will be visiting Washington DC. I’ll be back to share more about that later!
Edited 11/18/07 We’ve been back from our trip to Washington DC for a couple of weeks now and have since finished our Glorious Flight unit and lapbook. This was, by far, the largest lapbook we have done. We ended up extending it to include lots of flight history, jobs related to airplanes, and airplanes themselves. And of course with 2 field trip related to this study, including one to the Air and Space Museum, let’s just say we lived, ate, and breathed airplanes for almost a month! Here are some pictures of both our lapbook and our trip to the Air and Space Museum.
This is the lapbook cover. This lapbook is made with 2 file folders glued together, with extensions added to both sides. Like I said, it’s big!
This is the first file folder opened……
and this is the second file folder opened.
n the first file folder, these minit books are on top of the extension. There is a history of flight timeline, along with 3 minit books about Louis Bleriot, The Wright Brothers, and Charles Lindbergh.
With the extension lifted, you’ll find our maps, flags and clipart of France and Great Britain, along with pictures of several of Louis Bleriot’s unsuccessful planes.
In the second file folder, you’ll find several minit books on top of the center extension. There are books about different types of transportation, onomatopoeia, a small French dictionary, and a book with different possibilities of book titles. One of the alternate titles forThe Glorious Flight that Ben came up with was, The Eleventh Try since it was Bleriot XI that finally flew well enough to make it over the English Channel. On the left side of this half, you’ll find his vocabulary book and on the right, a book about the job responsibilities of air traffic controllers and an airplane memory game.
Lifting the extension in the second file folder reveals more fun. There are minit books about ordinal numbers and Roman numerals, as well as a couple of airplanes to label.
There is one more little graph that I didn’t take a picture of. It’s a paper airplane graph. The premise is to make several different paper airplanes, fly them, measure the distance they flew, and graph the distances. I put the graph in our lapbook (it’s underneath the labeled airplanes) with plans of completing this as soon as the weather cooperates.
This photo is of Ben posing with the pilot, in the cockpit of the airplane that flew us home from Washington DC. Every time we have flown (except for the time Ben was only 6 months old), he has asked to see the cockpit of the airplane. And every time, the pilots have graciously given him that opportunity. I think this child may be a pilot some day!
I’d like to introduce you all to Flat Eli. We are participating in a Flat Stanley exchange with our Five in a Row friends. Flat Eli went with us to Washinton DC. Here he is enjoying his “window seat.” And yes, that’s the wing of the airplane with the beautiful blue sky above and clouds below the plane. It was the perfect day to fly!
Here is Ben standing in front of the Wright Brothers plane, commonly known as the Wright Flyer, housed in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
Also housed in the Air and Space Museum is The Spirit of St. Louis. This is the airplane that Charles Lindbergh made his non-stop flight over the Atlantic Ocean in. He flew from NYC to Paris. We were amazed at how small this plane is. (you can see Ben’s head in the corner of the picture for a frame of reference on the size)
This replica of a space shuttle was a big hit with Ben, but even more of a hit was….
finding out the answer to the question, “how do they go to the bathroom in space?”
Here’s the back side of the “space potty” display. Ben spent quite some time figuring this all out. Oh the joys of little boys and bodily functions!
I feel kind of funny ending the photo shoot with a toilet, but I suppose it’s fitting, since this is Ben’s blog! We hope you enjoyed our journey with The Glorious Flight. It sure did take us to some amazing places, both in person and in our imaginations!
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