Come Fly With Me: A West PM Project About Flight

By Todd Erickson, Head Teacher

Thrust and lift will help a bird to fly,
Weight and drag bring it down from the sky.
–Bird Flight, a West PM story time song
 
In the West PM class last fall, hollow-block rocket ships blasted off from the patio to the far reaches of the galaxy. Airplanes took shape on the patio woodworking table and lifted off, while kites came together at the design table and flew throughout the outdoor space. Dramatic/pretend play often focused on a host of flying creatures, including unicorns and pteranodons. Even everyday aerial visitors, like the red-tailed hawks that nest in Bing’s pine trees and the passing airplanes flying overhead, were capturing the attention of our children. Flight was on the children’s minds.
 
With this widespread budding interest, the West PM teachers decided to embark upon a project that would support our classroom’s fascination with flight. We first brainstormed some of the curricular possibilities that a project focused on flying could provide, including disciplines such as language arts and math as well as broader modalities such as dramatic play, music and block building.
 
It can be very effective to begin a project by finding out what children know about the project’s subject or topic. The teachers asked the children their thoughts about flying. Our initial question was “What do you know about flying?” The answers we received told us much about what children either already knew or wanted to know.
 
Jack: “Airplanes can go fast before they take off, and before they go fast they go super slow.”
Ainsley: [Flaps her arms.]
Sophie: “Planes have wings!”
Catalaya: “That bugs fly really fast.”
Jude: “Flying is a type of paper airplane or a real airplane.”
Tommy: “Airplanes fly with wings!”
Mikey: “That airplanes fly faster.”
Thomas: “I think a bullet flies really fast.”
 
To expand on the topic of flight, we asked the children, “What are some things that fly?” As with the answers to the previous question, children shared with us knowledge that was grounded—age appropriately—in both fact and magical thinking.
 
Kaya: “Fairies! Butterflies! Bees!”
Caleb: “Airplanes and helis fly in the sky. Spaceships and rocket ships fly too.”
James: “Birds! They have wings!”
Niko: “Spaceships. If you need to go to space, you say ‘super sonic’ and you go to space. Or you say ‘ready, steady, go.’”
Kendall: “Rocket ships and airplanes and leaves.”
Anders: “Jumbo jets!”
Katherine L.: “Shoo flies, dragon.flies, and pony unicorns.”
Ellie C.: “Mosquitoes!”
Evia: “Bugs! Fleas!”
Dastan: “Balloons, a fly, seashells!”
Peter: “Kites!”
Henry B.: “Helicopters!”
 
Dramatic play provided yet another vehicle for our flying project. Using block building as a springboard, the teachers and children worked together to create signs such as “Airport” and made lists of possible airplane destinations. Along the way, children challenged their collaborative skills and their planning and processing abilities as they constructed airplanes and airports out of blocks. The children also enjoyed extensive opportunities for language arts-related work as they wrote their name and destination on their boarding passes. Even paper airplanes, one of the staples of the flying project, lent themselves to dramatic play, as the children decorated their planes and took on the role of the pilot as they zoomed through the play yard.
 
A child built an elevated runway for a plane in the block area.
 
Another favorite activity of the children was kite making and flying. As the autumn quarter sailed by, the children embarked on a new aspect of kite making: measuring the length of the string that was to be attached to the kite. A foundational piece of a child’s growing mathematical awareness is measurement, an important vehicle for exploration of an object’s properties. Measurement comprehension begins when a child can identify aspects such as “big” and “heavy,” and later moves to comparisons between objects such as “longer” or “faster.”
 
We took the kite-making opportunity to help the children think about measurement and use measurement tools. In the case of the kite string, we asked the children, “How long should we make your kite string?” and then introduced the idea of measuring their string upon completion of the kite. We also asked the children what we could use to measure the string, and received some truly original ideas. One day we measured the string with a book (Caps for Sale was chosen). Another day we measured the string with a tape dispenser. Finally, we settled into using the blocks from our block-building area. All of these nonstandard units of measurement provided the children with a hands-on, visual experience with measurement and the property we call “length.” We also asked children to record the length of their kite string, to allow some practice in writing numbers.
 
As work with the kite strings continued, children’s number sense and understanding of measurement developed:
 
Teacher Todd: “We can use anything as a tool to measure.”
Olivia: “We can use measuring tape!”
Zeyad: “I want to do 11. Eleven is more than 10.”
Dario: “One thousand is even more.”
Ellie H. (to a peer as both measure): “Mine is one more than yours!”
Cole: “I want 60.”
Bronwyn: “I want 80.” 
 
During the winter quarter, the teachers introduced some of the physics surrounding flight. During story time, we sang Bird Flight (excerpted at the beginning of this article) and used our hands as wings to feel and discuss the concepts of lift and drag. The story time book Stellaluna—about the adventures of a young bat who is separated from her mother—also allowed us to talk about and experiment with the process of echolocation (how some bats “see” in the dark).
 
The West PM class was very fortunate to be able to host visits from two pilots: Phil Winters (former Navy pilot and husband of Bing Director Jennifer Winters) and Aydin Senkut (private pilot and father of West PM’s Alex Senkut). These expert visitors came to the classroom on consecutive days and shared some of the practical aspects of flying a plane, including how to take off and land, and the type of information the pilot needs to share with and hear from the control tower. The children greatly enjoyed these visits and relished the opportunity to try on a real pilot’s headset.
 
Children make sense of their world through concrete and playful experienc.es. The flight project gave our children the chance to explore more deeply some of the various aspects of flight through hands-on involvement as well as abundant opportunities for creativity.