Friday, January 17, 2014

Let’s Go Fly A Kite

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Today we had another awesome day doing our History of Flight unit study. So far this unit has been so much fun; a great way to end the week.

Today we learned about kites. The Chinese invented kites around 500 BC. They used them for fun, but they also used them as a tool. The Chinese were the first people to build kites big enough to fly a person in, and they did it to spy on their enemies in war.

So we built our own kites today. And although they weren’t big enough, or light enough to actually stay up in the air, we had a good time taping pirates and other small action figures to them and running around pretending like they were Chinese spies.
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Once again I was very impressed with our awesome book. Lincoln was able to read and follow almost all of the directions without my help (he got a little confused with the direction that explained how to fold the square diamond so that it was a long stretched diamond, so I helped a little with that one). And once again, we had all the supplies we needed already at our house. Adding the pirates was my idea, not in the book, even though the book does talk about people flying in kites, it doesn’t tell you to include that in your activity. :)

After we flew the kites, we came inside and made the beginnings of our timelines. I cut out a long section of butcher paper for each kid. Originally, I was just planning on gluing the kites and everything else to the timeline. But Lincoln explained that he wanted to be able to play with it more later, and that made a lot of sense. So instead, I just made pockets on the timeline that they can tuck the kites into. Then I had Lincoln copy a short paragraph about the Chinese flying kites and what they used them for and cut it out and glue it on his timeline. I only made Ivan copy the date and cut it out and glue it on his time line. We taped the timelines up on the walls in their rooms. I’ll post pictures when there is a little more on it to see. In the meantime, here are some more of our kite flying adventures. It was a beautiful day to be outside…for January.

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