I noticed one of the second graders folding the top of her single-serving cereal into a little airplane, so I decided we should spend a couple weeks learning about airplanes and aeronautics.  We started off by building our own designs and seeing how they flew.  The second graders were much more experimental with their designs.

We weighed all sorts of paper to measure their mass and talked about how that factors into a good flight.  We went with phone book paper because it was the easiest to fold of the light papers.  They ran lots of test flights down the hall to see the difference between wing size and shapes and how weight affects flight time.  The tailed design was a big hit.  I want to build RC airplanes with them someday, but that’s a bit costly.  Maybe we’ll work on rockets next time.