Planes
This activity is great to try at home to help improve listening skills, resilience and motor skills all at the same time. Using the beautiful book Leaf by Sandra Dieckmann as inspiration this activity comes from our Polar Bear activity box. It is also great for developing the scientific skills of making predictions and creating a fair test.
Set up
Well this really did involve no set up at all really. I just got the very pretty origami paper from our Polar Bear activity box out and the activity card and that was it!
So I really wanted the girls to have a go at making their own paper aeroplanes even if they found it challenging and weren’t necessarily perfect. It would be great for them to follow instructions and persevere. And of course all that paper folding is great for motor skills!
So I became a Blue Peter presenter and demonstrated with my sheet of paper. We followed the instructions step by step and I often repeated showing how to do each step several times.
Of course for F it was very challenging but she gave it her best! M really impressed me, it would have been so easy for her to give up and “Mummy do it” but she kept going and showed fantastic resilience! After many, many folds and unfolds she had something that resembled a paper aeroplane. She had cracked it and was so proud!
The next step was take to take our aeroplanes for a test flight. They were so excited to do this and we didn’t make it outside before they were launched. We then looked for other natural items that we thought would also made good aeroplanes to help Polar Bear get back to the arctic. This is where our science came in and we made our predictions as to which we thought would fly the furthest. The outcome was again in many ways irrelevant but the discussion of why and how to make it fair was far more important!