Aviation Classroom Theme

We love aviation as a classroom theme for all ages. It’s easy to set up your classroom, science and social studies connections abound, and the theme fits in well with all kinds of motivational and character programs. Our linked resources will give you some great computer skills practice, too.

Also check out our Travel Theme and Hot Air Balloon Classroom Theme for more ideas.

Think about a bulletin board:

• Stick Kids Airplanes 6″ Designer Cut-Outs Variety Pack have CTP’s beloved stick kids towing space for messages. These are terrific for putting all the kids’ names on your door, of course, but they can also surround a large airplane on a bulletin board.

• RoomMates Vintage Planes Peel & Stick Wall Decals are highly realistic planes, and they help you get around the lack of bulletin board space a lot of us face now in classrooms. Reusable Wall Sticker Airplanes are the same peel and stick solution, but with brighter, more fanciful planes. Add clouds to complete the picture. Write kids’ names on the clouds, or use them to write class goals and standards.
• Add a 3-D element with Safari Ltd In The Sky Toob toy planes, foam vintage gliders, or have students make their own paper airplanes — hang them from the ceiling all around the room.

Airplane classroom theme slogans:

• Up, up and away!
• Soaring into a new year
• We’re flying high
• High flying readers
• Taking off!
• Aiming high!
• We’re just “plane” great!

Add airplane books to your library table:

• Amazing Airplanes for young readers
• Airplanes by Patricia Hubbell has illustrations that invite close inspection.
• A is for Airplane: An Aviation Alphabet has lots of information; it’s an alphabet book, but there’s so much to read that it shouldn’t be limited to early readers.
• In the Cockpit: Inside 50 History-Making Aircraft is filled with photos and detail about historic airplanes from the Simithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
• Kids’ Paper Airplane Book is for hands-on use. We love this book, and your class will, too.
• The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane introduces the impressive story that every kid should know.

Set up a flight simulator in your computer center. There are plenty of options, but we checked with pilots and have these recommendations:

• GEFS is a free online flight simulator based on Google Earth.
• You can actually get the flight experience within Google Earth. To enter airplane mode,  press CTRL + Alt + A (command + option + A on a Mac). Visit the Google Earth Help Center for more details.
• Microsoft Flight Simulator is probably the most popular flight simulator software for casual use, and it’s affordable. Download a demo.
• X-Plane v 9.0 is more realistic than the Microsoft game, and can actually be used for flight training.

Welcome students with virtual field trips:

• The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has a virtual tour.
• The Airventure Museum has several.
• The National Naval Air Museum has a wonderful collection of exhibits that make science points, plus exciting programs for students and teachers.
• The National Air and Space Museum offers videoconferencing for classrooms on a regular basis.
• The Virtual Air Museum has an astonishing wealth of data about airplanes from all over the world.
• The Warhawk Air Museum has a 360 degree virtual tour that provides some good mouse practice.

•  NASA’s Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics leads to pages appropriate to various age and grade levels.
• Build an airplane viturally at AvKids to learn about the parts of a plane (and get some drag and drop practice).
• Scholastic has a cool interactive timeline of flight. Add the dates to your classroom timeline.
• The National Air and Space Museum has a very cool interactive animation that lets you understand and experiment with drag, lift, thrust, and weight. We crashed our plane several times as we learned how these forces interact.
• The National Museums of Scotland has a cool plane building game  that goes into detail about how different aspects of a plane affect its performance in different circumstances.

The Emperor’s Nightingale Lesson Plans

“The Emperor’s Nightingale” is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish author, set in China. In the story, the Emperor of China discovers a nightingale, a bird which sings so beautifully that its song restores the ailing Emperor’s health.  The Emperor of Japan sends a mechanical singing bird to the Emperor of China, and his court prefers the artificial bird to the real bird — until the Emperor of China falls ill again. The nightingale come back, sings the Emperor back to health, and asks the Emperor to keep it secret. When the servants arrive in the morning, they are amazed to find the Emperor well.

There are several online versions of the story:

• The Nightingale, by Hans Christian Andersen
• A simpler version
• Rick Walton’s retelling

There are some excellent picture books of the story as well:

• The Nightingaleby Pikko Vainio
• The Nightingale by Jerry Pinkney out of print, but check your library or buy used — great illustrations)
• The Nightingale by Stephen Mitchell

Once you’ve read the story, choose some of the worksheetsand activities linked below in online resources to make sure students have completely understood the story.

Online resources:

• Hear a simplified version of the story read and illustrated at Speakaboos, along with discussion questions and worksheets.
• Watch parts of the opera at the PBS website.
• Listen to some of Stravinsky’s music for the ballet inspired by the story:

• The Barnum Museum has a PDF of activities to go with their play based on The Nightingale. It includes map work for the continent of Asia and particularly for China.
• The Midland Art Center has a collection of worksheets for their production of “The Emporer and the Nightingale.”
• Rag & Bone theater also has a study guide. It looks at concepts of leadership, as well as the puppets the theater uses.
• Usborne has a worksheet suitable for ESL as well as for elementary students.
• Penguin has a reproducible guide as well, designed to go with The Emperor and the Nightingale (Penguin Young Readers, Level 4).
• Nightingales from the BBC gives excellent background on the birds.

Continue with one or more of the lesson plans below.

Write a poem.

Malvina Reynolds wrote a song based on the story. Have students read the lyrics and discuss how the verses connect with the story. Is Reynolds retelling the story or using the story to make a different point?

Ask students to think about the points that come up in reading and thinking about “The Emperor’s Nightingale.” Divide students into groups and have each group choose a point to write about. Challenge students to write their own verses.

Create a mechanical bird.

The mechanical nightingale was a sort of robot. Use our Robot Lesson Plans to explore the idea of robots further.

In the story, the artificial bird sings only one song, while the real bird sang many, and a fisherman muses that the artificial bird’s song is missing something. Discuss whether there are times when  an artifical version of something is not as good as a real one.

The Emperor likes the fact that the artificial bird can sing the same song over and over without getting tired, and also that the artificial bird was covered with jewels. The real bird said that she would rather stay in the forest, so the arrival of the artificial bird gave her the chance to return to her home. Discuss times when an artificial version of something might be better.

Have students design a mechanical bird (a robot bird?) by drawing or creating a model. Will the students choose to make their bird a golden, jewelled bird?This is, for the Emporer, an advantage to the artificial bird, and the students may agree. Ask students to decorate their birds and label the parts to show how they would work, if the bird were in fact mechanical.

Of course, now it would be very easy to make an artifical singing bird. Just add a recordable sound chip to student models to get the full effect.

Explore Orientalism.

Andersen was Danish, and didn’t visit China or Japan. Why did he choose to set this story in Asia? Many 19th century European artists, including writers, were fascinated by Asia, seeing it as the embodiment of mystery and wonder. Andersen might have chosen China as the setting for his story in order to make it more romantic. The practice of creating works of art emphasizing the mysteriousness of the East came to be known as “Orientalism.”

Older students might find it interesting to study the controversy surrounding Orientalism and whether it is a racist approach to Asia, but younger students might be comfortable with the idea that people enjoy thinking about far away places.

Have students prepare a Venn diagram comparing China and Japan during the 19th century. Try some of these resources:

• BBC photos of China
• Harvard photos of China
• Xianfeng Emperor of China (other emperors of China are also included)
• an essay comparing China and Japan
• Columbia University Asian history resources
• stereoviews of 19th century Japan

19th century China

19th century Japan

Another example students might enjoy is Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, a British light opera from the same time period which has the Emperor of Japan as a character.

Challenge students to illustrate the story as realistically as possible.

Mars Lesson Plans

Mars is our neighbor in space, and it has thrilled Earthlings for centuries. We offer three great lesson plans for getting to know this neighbor.

Online resources:

• Look at Mars. This is a project of Google Sky, and you should look at it if nothing else.
• NASA’s Mars page
• NASA’s Mars Rover page
• Interactive Mars habitat
• Basic facts on Mars (there are some ads and no printable version, but it’s good background).
• Earth Sky explains why Mars looks brighter at some times than at others. Right now is a great time to look for Mars! Have students look for Mars as homework and write a description of what they see.
• Astronomy for Kids Mars page
• Look at a Martian dust devil.
• A PDF activity about Mars focuses on the search for water on Mars.
• Scholastic offers an article on how to dress for a trip to Mars.

Books:

• DK Eyewitness Books: Mars
• Cars on Mars: Roving the Red Planet
• You Are the First Kid on Mars
• The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity (Scientists in the Field Series) (forthcoming) The inspiring story of the Mars Rover.
• The Adventures of Sojourner : The Mission to Mars That Thrilled the World
• The Hubble Space Telescope 
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for some great retro Mars fantasy
• Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars  and Freddy and the Men from Mars  are more great stories from the days when people expected to meet Martians fairly soon — the whole Freddy the Pig series is a read-aloud hit with younger students.

Friendly Martians

As this 1924 U.S. Navy telegram offering to listen for expected radio communication from Mars shows, there was a time in the 20th century when people generally believed that there were sentient beings living on Mars. A 19th century astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, wrote about the “canali” he saw on the surface of Mars. He thought he was seeing channels of water, but some people misinterpreted his Italian word to mean “canals.” This set off a storm of discussion of whether Mars might be inhabited. Schiaparelli wrote of the channels,

Their singular aspect, and their being drawn with absolute geometrical precision, as if they were the work of rule or compass, has led some to see in them the work of intelligent beings… I am very careful not to combat this supposition, which includes nothing impossible.

An American amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, drew detailed maps of Mars with canals and apparent cities. Artists began to draw Martian cities with spiky towers rising from the red land. While most scientists agreed that Mars showed no particular signs of being inhabited, the idea appealed to enough people that there was widespread belief in Martians. Books and movies about Martians became very popular.

On Sunday, October 30, 1938, there was a radio broadcast of Orson Welles’s adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells. Many listeners missed the introduction, and thought that the program was an actual news broadcast of an invasion by Martians.

In 1965, the Mariner expedition dashed the hopes of all those who wanted to get to know Martians by capturing photos of the surface of Mars which, far from having cool cities linked by canals, looked a lot like our moon.

Since then, photos from the Viking expedition and the Hubble telescope have made it clear that any life on Mars must be very small and not up to building cities. And yet, there are still plenty of people writing about and drawing Martians. Check out the Sesame Street Martians, play math games with the Ratio Martians, and then have students imagine their own Martians.

This activity can involve lots of research and a requirement that the Martians be designed to suit the Martian landscape as shown by NASA (see resources above), or it can be an imaginative art project. Either way, have students draw their Martians, labeling the important features of their drawings, and prepare a bulletin board display of the drawings.

Colonizing Mars

Predictions of Martian colonies have been made for many years. 2030 is one of the years given for the first Martian colony. Have your students calculate their ages in 2030 and imagine themselves among the first Martian colonists.

Students should conduct some research for this project. Some of the things they might consider learning about:

• the terrain of Mars
• the atmosphere and resources of Mars
• the temperature on the surface of Mars
• any signs of weather or seasons on Mars
• colonies and their relationships with their mother countries (if colonial politics seems too old-fashioned to be relevant, students might consider the relationships of the United States and territories such as Puerto Rico as an example)
• life on the space shuttle

Use our Science Fiction Genre Study in preparation, prepare a board of facts on Mars to use in the writing, and have students write a week’s worth of journal entries about their experiences as Martian colonists.

Google Mars

Visit Google Mars. Share this video with students first:

Give students time to explore Mars freely. Then have students create a tour of Mars in Google Earth. This activity can readily be combined with either of the others: have students add pictures of their friendly Martians to their tour, or create a tour showing the places they’ve visited in their early days as colonists.

Publish a Poem with Paint

Famous Poets in the Classroom

Too often our English books present poetry lessons with doggerel intended only for the classroom. Fingerplays are fun and we want our students to write their own poetry, but there’s no reason not to introduce the works of great poets to kids.

These are the works that will stay in their minds and influence their own thinking and writing.

• Poetry for Young People: Maya Angelou
• Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg
• Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson
• Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare
• Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes
• Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost
• Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll
• Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost

Now that you have some famous poems to work with, what should you do with them?

Learn something about the poet

We may not need to know who wrote “Five Little Monkeys” in order to enjoy it fully, but knowing something about the great poets, and about their lives and times, adds depth to our understanding of their work. Even when a poet is surprising or atypical for his or her time and place, that can be important information.

Books like Shakespeare for Kids: His Life and Times, 21 Activities let you examine the world of the poet fully, but it doesn’t hurt to turn kids loose and let them do some research. Add the important dates of the poet’s life to your classroom timeline, find his or her home town on the map, and think about what the world was like in that time and place. Also check out the University of Toronto’s Places of Poems and Poets.

Read the poem

Most poetry is intended to be read aloud. Hear more than one reading of each poem, since the nuances may be different, and encourage students to memorize short poems and recite them. Don’t think they can’t, either — kids who can recite whole scenes of movies and all the current commercial jingles can also recite poetry.

Analyze the poem

We don’t recommend telling students “what the author was trying to say.” We believe that the reader and poet together construct the meaning of a poem, and that it’s possible to get different things from a poem. Even if you don’t agree with us, consider giving students the opportunity to do their own thinking and analysis, since these are important skills. Our lesson on “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats includes the kind of open-ended questions that can help students think about what a poem might mean. Our National Poetry Month Lesson Plans  has a simple plan you can use to begin an analysis of any poem.

 Create something with the poem

Have students choose a favorite line or two from a poem and create something with it. There are many possibilities:

• Use a graphics program or art supplies to create a poster. If you use a graphics program, you can then make a Pinterest page with all the posters.

• Write the lines on Shrinkable Plastic and use them to create jewelry.
• Make a large mosaic with bits of paper for your hallway.

Geography of Ireland Classroom Activities

With St. Patrick’s Day upon us, it’s a great time to learn the geography of Ireland. Any time of year is a great time to improve geography skills, actually, and you can use these ideas with other places, too, but I’ve got some great links for your Ireland study. Here are three excellent ways to learn more about Irish geography. Read more

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