Tag Archives: flying

Connecting Flights

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I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about how to connect my current summer work with my classroom come August, and to be honest it’s a little tricky.

The program I am working on with the Science Festival has me developing curriculum for libraries across the state. This is all well and good, but the largest part of how I’m spending my time is working on something that I won’t necessarily be directly implementing in my classroom.

A few weeks ago, we met with some librarians from Durham County Libraries (DURHAM REPRESENT!), and we had a very productive, informative meeting. Something that struck me as surprising was how adamant the librarians were that they were NOT teachers, and they do NOT want to see lesson plans of any kind in a program, because libraries are NOT school.

Needless to say, this completely changed my perspective on my project at hand.

I had worked on developing some lessons to teach students about the four basic principles of flight — lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Initially, this was the plan, but I’ve come to find out that plans change very quickly. Upon hearing this, a new direction had to be set with our programming. I still have all the lessons I wrote initially, and I will probably use them in some capacity in my class.

The most relevant thing I think about this project is a vetted book list I’m creating with books for all grade levels, K-5, about flight. I’m working with a children’s literature specialist from UNC on vetting the list, and I’m getting input from other librarians and teachers in my network. I do a lot of read alouds in my reading class, and reading about flight will definitely help kids make explicit connections for their project time.

When I started this project, I was under the impression we’d be looking at not only plane flight, but space flight as well. Right before school was out for the summer, I came up with an incredibly integrated culminating task for my unit on solar system, physics, and economy, and I was hoping that would play nicely into the work I’d do at the Science Festival. Needless to say, the jury is still kind of out on that one.

I’m really enjoying my time with the NC Science Festival, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to create a program for libraries across the state to use to further science education, specifically about flight. I’m also curious to get a clearer picture of how I can use what I’m doing now to shape what I do in my classroom with my third graders.

Preparing for Take Off

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!