Kids Love Paper Airplanes

Looking for a low cost activity for you and your child?  Try making paper airplanes.  If you and your child have never made paper airplanes together, you're definitely missing out on some fun.  I set up a paper airplane making activity in my summer camp this week for 3rd - 5th graders.  My oldest daughter had the opportunity to join me for the day and had a blast watching the other kids build planes and building her own.

If you're not very good at making paper airplanes, don't worry.  Neither am I.  There are several web sources instructing you how to design different planes, but this really isn't needed.  Let you children start on their own.  Who cares if the plane looks like it will immediately nose dive when released.  The point of this exercise is to get your kids thinking about what is required to make a plane fly.  Ask them questions about their planes.  What does this piece do?  Why did you design it like this?  I asked my students these questions and they had a ton of reasons for their designs.

Making the planes is the first step, but you can make it more interesting for you child if you make a game out of it.  Which plane will fly the farthest?  Which plane will fly the highest?  Which plane spends the longest in the air?  Which plane does the coolest trick?  Which plane was most creative?  My students had a blast with this and took pride in designing planes that would be the best at something.  Here's a picture I took of a couple of planes these students made:

Paper Airplanes

These planes may not look like much, and in some cases they did very poorly in flight, but kids will quickly learn what works well and doesn't work well.  That's science!  These kids (and yours) will learn from their failures in making paper airplanes.  You can't be successful if you haven't first experienced failure.