The Wright’s Flight--and Beyond
By Linda Lindroth

For a printable about the history - and the future - of flight click here. PDF 93KB

On Dec. 17, 1903 in Kill Devil Hills, NC, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered flight after years of research, design and testing. Your class can celebrate the aviation achievements of the past 100 years with the following resources and ideas.

For a terrific book about the Wrights' accomplishment, try Russell Freedman's The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane, from Holiday House (shown above).

One hundred years in the air
www.centennialofflight.gov
The answers to any question about flight can be found by running a Timeline search of this extensive database. Use the Links of the Day for an essay on a famous aviation personality, a fact from This Day in History and a Cool Link to a featured site. There's enough content here to have an Aviation Moment each school day, or to assign one student to prepare a news report each day for a Centennial of Flight newspaper.

Activity: Make a chart with three columns: people, events and technology. Challenge students to find articles, pictures and Internet references to the Centennial of Flight and post the events on the chart in the appropriate column. You can team up with other classes to create a Flight Timeline in the hallway and have each class add news findings at the correct point on the timeline. Assign each class a color to frame their findings, and graph which classroom has contributed the most to the Flight Timeline.

Visions of flight
www.centennialofflight.gov/exhibit/posters.htm
Don't miss this web page with free, downloadable NASA educational posters on the Wright Brothers, Gliders, Aerospace Careers, Metrics and Invention. Each two-sided poster has an image on the front and activities on the back. There is even a Centennial of Flight bookmark with activities for celebrating 100 years of flight. For more educational materials from NASA, visit www.nasa.gov

The "Wright" place
www.education-world.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson320.shtml
This is a terrific curriculum find with biography links, photo resources and more than 12 in-depth lesson plans/units for the study of flight. Get plans for designing a model aircraft, detailed lessons from the Smithsonian, a Wright brothers activity book, NASA Quest and a short Wright brothers skit. This site is a must-see for any teacher planning a unit on flight.

Activity: Have your students use the examples of Wright brothers biographies to write picture books about an element of flight. Using the detailed information about flight from the Smithsonian, start a class project in which the students create a museum exhibit about flight.

For a printable about the history - and the future - of flight click here. PDF 93KB

Linda K. Lindroth is Teaching K-8's technology editor and website coordinator, and a technology resource teacher at Russell Cave Elementary School in Lexington, KY.

November/December 2003, Vol.34, No.3