The Wright Brothers first flew in North Carolina, it’s on their license plates and everything, this means when we studied North Carolina I had to create a Wright Brothers lesson and have a fun bit of history lesson and a fun science lesson as we tried to create our own flight. Only it didn’t quite work as planned.
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Wright Brothers lesson resources
This is kind of amusing for 2022 Ticia to be updating this post because we just redid the Wright Brothers lesson for our final run through history last year, and so I know SO much more about the Wright brothers than I did originally, and their life is fascinating.
But, getting back into the Wright brothers lesson (I just realized I’m automatically capitalizing brothers when I type it for some odd reason).
Potential books to read:
- To Fly: The Story of the Wright Brothers
- Who Were the Wright Brothers?
- The Story of the Wright Brothers (I just realized my friend wrote this)
Huh, 2022 Ticia just hopped over to my First and Second Industrial Revolution playlist, and I didn’t finish that… Oops, so here is a quick find of the video I would have shared with my kids for the Wright brothers, and I better go finish up that playlist.
Here are the resources I used for learning about them last year:
Okay, let’s talk about our Wright Brothers lesson 12 years ago
I went to paper airplane design to find all of our different ideas and then we had fun making them.
Only, it didn’t quite go as planned. I carefully chose planes they said would fly very far. I had them all make guesses, and then here’s what happened with our planes.
In case you can’t tell, the picture on the left is my plane up on the roof. As far as I know, it’s still there. The kids’ planes all went straight down. You can kind of see one in the bushes.
Batman checking out what happened. This was not the amazing experiment I was hoping for. Undaunted we tried again, this time not from our balcony, which I was so sure would give that extra UMPH to the experiment, and make me the SUPER COOL MOM who let her kids throw paper airplanes off the balcony.
So, we tried again from the front porch. Again, the planes didn’t go so far, like maybe to the end of that little walkway, and all three of the different styles went about the same distance. Which is almost nowhere.
And here’s the science behind it. Really, this didn’t go as well as I was hoping for. I told Jeff when he left for work that the kids were going to be talking about it when he came home from work. We went to lunch with him and they barely remembered doing it. With a little prodding, they told him about it, instead, they told him all about how they drew and that they got to paint, and who knows what else, but airplanes, not a whit.
Oh well, maybe with our study of Asia and China we’ll blow something up next week, that’ll be interesting, right? They’ll remember it enough to talk about it to Jeff that night….. That’s my theory. I mean if the weather had cooperated we could have flown kites and compared those to our planes.
Sigh, hopefully soon we’ll be off this unsuccessful science streak it feels like we’re in. So, I know you’ve told me before how your experiments didn’t go well either, but this one really felt disappointing. We didn’t even get to recover by eating ice cream.
Doug has a “no fail” paper airplane, that does stunts. If I can talk him into letting me take pictures of him making one, maybe I'll post it later, today.
We made paper airplanes in grad school after a presentation about aerodynamics. We tried different folds and flew them in the hallway. At most, they flew 3 feet. Most didn't go very far but what we did notice was that depending on the fold, some went straight, to the right, left, and one circled back. Maybe you can try them indoors? We also made kites out of garbage bags and they flew extremely well on a windy day. Good luck!
I giggled out loud (GOL) when I saw where the planes ended up…
It's so nice to know that there are others out there who's “experiments” do NOT always go as planned! (You are NOT alone, sista!)
We have all had our little flops! Paper airplanes have never been my forte. I have made a few for Selena, but they never tend to do what I want them to do.
How fun. We love to make paper airplanes. They often turn out like yours, but it's still fun.
Thanks for sharing about the “failures,” too! It's nice to know I'm not alone!
I often think I should do the experiments by myself first to make sure they work, but I never have enough time – so sometimes it's me TRYING to make the thing work while my daughter goes off and does her own thing for a while…
Sorry it was a disappointing experiment. The only time I've had success with paper airplanes is when we got a kit that came with heavier paper and instructions for making all sorts of designs. They worked better (although most just hit the ground) but I think it was more related to the paper than the designs. I can't wait to see what you blow up during your study of Asia! LOL!!
Great idea in principle – sorry it didn't go as well as planned. We tried paper airplanes here too (made by me, of course). The thing is that Anna cannot throw them right, and height of the thrower also makes significant difference. But she still had fun watching me fly them and then bringing them back to me – she is pretty happy to delegate all the work involved to someone else 🙂