Paper airplanes

Owen spent a good part of the day building paper airplanes with regular printer-type paper. I mentioned that Mitch had received a couple of books about paper planes, that came with pretty paper and stickers, for his birthday one year. We found the books and Owen perused them. Together we learned the different folds, folding tips and flying tips. Then we built a few of the planes from the book using regular paper first then using the pretty paper. It's quite a bit like origami and as equally frustrating.

He experimented away with these planes for quite a while. We had learned about the "point of balance" in a recent Science Club gathering. This was a flying tip for paper airplanes - find the point of balance. While making folds we needed to make sure that all the edges and surfaces were as "symmetrical" as possible(hey, didn't we learn that in math?). Lots of learning has been going on with these airplanes. In the picture there's an airplane with a balloon attached, which he tried flying with the balloon untied. He wanted to watch the force, from releasing the blown up balloon, fly the plane. He also taped pencils on to one plane because he wanted to know how the weight would affect the flight.

Mackenzie decided to make crepes from the Jumbo Cookbook. She learned the importance of reading recipes over before starting to cook as she added butter that should have been melted, but was added in solid although soft. However, that didn't ruin the crepes at all. The kids tried them a few different ways: rolled up with applesauce, sprinkled with powdered sugar, drizzled with syrup, rolled up with blueberries. Yummmy. She made them again for dessert so that Dad and Mitch could try them too.

Hanna worked away on a story/short book that she's been typing on the computer and then she downloaded all the pictures from her camera. She loves to take pictures and videos with her camera and often spends a great deal of time doing either.

We finished Factory Girl today and started A Chance Child. We started learning about child labour and the industrial revolution last spring, but stopped for a few months. We've picked up the subject again and through the reading of Factory Girl we came across a book referenced called How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. I've order it from amazon and look forward to reading it and looking over the pictures of which it has many of that time.