Let me begin this post by letting the world know that I plan on making every title of my blog posts a flight pun.

I’m working with the North Carolina Science Festival this summer and I’m studying the physics of flight. To be completely honest, I started this week knowing very little about flying — I have limited experience with planes (I didn’t experience an airplane ride for the first time until I was 17-years-old) and I’m terrible at physics.

Sounds like “The First in Flight Challenge” is right up my alley, right?

I took a class at UNC called Physics 100: How Things Work. It was a requirement for my elementary education major, which, at the time, I found to be completely ridiculous. I’ve never studied so hard in my life and I’ve simultaneously never been more proud of a B-. I never thought I would need to have a physics knowledge to teach elementary schoolers, and as soon as I took that class final, I pulled an Elsa and just let it go.

Flash-forward and I’ve knocked out my first two years teaching on my own. Through those two years, I realized how important physics really is and how much I really do love learning how things work.

I constantly encourage my kids to ask questions and to figure out the why and how of things. Now, here I am, practicing what I preach.

I took on this fellowship with great excitement. I knew nothing about flight (see how that is a past participle?!) and was eager to learn something new.

That’s what this is all about for me — learning something new.

My ultimate goal that I’d like to achieve from this fellowship is to have a new experience and learn throughout the process. I want to better myself as both a teacher and a learner so that I can exemplify lifelong learning to my students.

This week has been such a blast. I’m working on lesson plans, reaching out to libraries, and building paper airplanes and testing the designs. Working this week has been an absolute dream and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see how all this works together in the end!