Field Trips and a Guest Speaker

We are in our final 2 weeks of our Flight study. The children have gotten really involved in exploring some complex concepts such as gravity, lift, drag, and force. We have made airplanes and rockets out of everything we can think of. We have created parachutes and released them. The children have explored innumerable cause and effect relationships. The flight study has been fully ingrained into the content areas such as math, science, literacy, and art as well as social and emotional development.

It's time to expand further on the subject. To make the topic more concrete, we are planning possibly 2 field trips and we have invited a guest speaker to come talk to the children. We're hoping to wrap up the study with the children still excited about the subject of flight.

We have invited a pilot to come speak to our children. Before he arrives, we will write out questions we want to ask him. We are hoping that since the children have spent so much time engrossed in the subject of flight that they may come up with some interesting questions for our guest.

On our agenda is a trip to a local small airport. Given the dynamics of the children in our class, we're unsure how this will turn out, but it will be worth the challenges to provide them with the opportunity to see a real airport and hopefully some planes in motion. We are still negotiating with them about actually getting on a plane. Keep your fingers crossed!

Finally, we are going to visit the local children's museum which actually has a display about flight. The children will have the opportunity to build various air planes and see how they fly. This trip should be a lot easier for us to manage since the location is a lot more confined.

There's still a lot for us to cover in order to wrap up our study in the 2 weeks before vacation. We're planning to begin a study on camping when we come back, so we want to make sure that the children feel the fight study's complete before they leave for vacation.