Paper Airplanes

For those who don't feel like clicking to see the June newsletter mentioned in the previous post, I'll reprint my article from it here.

Lessons in Life from Paper Airplanes

Recently our students, especially the boys, have shown tremendous interest in paper airplanes. They make them with any available time and any available paper. At first I thought it was interesting, then I began to worry that they should be spending their time "more productively," and finally I began to see that they were giving themselves quite an eduction. At least a hundred paper airplanes have been folded, flown and discarded over the past week or two. As I watched (and joined in the fun) I began to realize what wonderful lessons there are in the humble paper airplane. The following is a list of timeless truths the children have learned from folding and flying their airplanes. Of course they would express these truths in their own words if they expressed them at all.

• "A good start is half the battle." -Irish Proverb. (If the first fold is is good, the airplane has an excellent chance to fly well; if not, no way.)
• "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison, while working on the lightbulb. (By not being afraid to make mistakes, the children learned several ways not to make good paper airplanes, and in the process several ways to make very good ones.)
• "Imitation is at least 50 percent of the creative process" -Jamie Buckingham. (Starting from one of the few basic airplane patterns and improvising from there works better than folding randomly and ignoring what is known to work.)
• "Don't judge a book by its cover" -American Proverb. (Looks and aerodynamics aren't always correlated.)

And of course the children are exploring the physics of flight, improving eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills, and enjoying themselves immensely. Fortunately we have a lot of scrap paper.

I am learning from the paper airplanes too. I'm learning that children are much smarter than we usually give them credit for. They tend to know what they need to learn and to find out ways to teach themselves. Of course we need to guide their learning, and I think that one good way is to prepare an environment with many stimulating objects to explore. We do our best at the preschool to make an environment that encourages learning and exploration. I'm sure you do similar things at home. Let's share ideas with one another.