Letters from NYC

Spring Break in Space

I began to plan for my son’s spring break in February. For a single parent, 8 days of togetherness with a 5 year old Sprout can either be quite boring or stressful, if no plans are in place. When planning for a vacation I usually start with a theme and work my way from there to include outings, activities, crafts and lesson plans that will incorporate as many aspects of the theme and will also support his curriculum at school.

The theme this vacation was to be Aerodynamics and Flying. I write “was” because my son began to get sick the day before spring break started. It’s a real bummer because I had obtained free tickets (by pulling some strings) to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum and the Liberty Science Center.

It was not a total loss. Even though he had a cold we were still able to make a variety of paper airplanes and watch some of the theme related videos I borrowed from the Library. For me, making and flying the paper airplanes has been my favorite part of the week so far. I used The Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes which provides step by step instructions and visuals on how to make ten of the worlds best paper airplanes. Information is also included about distance, speed, and trajectory, among other things. This helped me teach him about the relationships between bodies at rest and those in motion I also taught him how to use some basic math to predict distance.

We then used that knowledge to also figure out the distance of the moon from earth, learned about the moon mission of the past and current NASA missions to other planets. It was perfect timing since last night we had a full moon and we were able to track easily it’s movement with a hand held telescope. While he surveyed the sky he spotted the North Star, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (he’s known how to find and identify them since he was 3 years old). It’s absolutely amazing how much of a little sponge he is. Can you tell I’m really proud of him? Well, that was until he let me know that next year for spring break he wants to attend NASA's Space Camp for kids. :o

It’s been a great way for him to learn and for us to spend time together in a closed environment. If you have kids I recommend you consider this book for bad weather days, when they’re sick but especially if you get stuck on vacation with bad weather. Klutz books always provides endless hours of incredible fun while helping kids explore the world they live in. Here’s hoping your spring break was phenomenal.

--------------------------- UPDATE --------------------------------------------------
Received a couple of emails from concerned individuals in my parent's group. No, my son is not being tortured with mathematical equations the size of Pluto, or Eistein's theories of relativity. We covered that 2 vacations ago. We're now discussing "Laws of Motion" and how String Theory and Quantum Mechanics combine to explain quantum gravity.

Getting back to the math computation of distance between planets...ever heard of scale models? We used colored balloons and colored tape to do a 3D model of our solar system and their planetary orbits. Observing the moon and other stars at night through our telescope has given my son a true concept of the magnificence of this world.

Posted by Michele at March 26, 2005 08:41 PM