Mrs. Dennison's Class

Crazy Boys

Watching buzzards,
Flying kites,
Lazy, crazy boys
The Wrights. They

Tried to fly
Just like a bird
Foolish dreamers
Strange. Absurd. We

Scoffed and scorned
Their dreams of flight
But we were wrong
And they were Wright. .

By Beverly McLoughland

This poem was our introduction to the Wright Brothers. Students talked about what they already knew about the Wright Brothers, and then the children and a partner read one of the various books we had in the classroom. They took notes, shared the information, and finally chose five important facts for a Kidspiration creation about Orville and Wilbur. Here is a sample of one of our creations in Kidspiration. Click here to download the file.

For homework each child used an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper to create an airplane, and the next day we measured how far our airplanes flew and graphed the results.

Everyone made a poster to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Wright Brothers, and we learned about quilting templates as we made a paper airplane quilt.

Finally we combined our individual ideas into an acrostic poem about the Wright Brothers.

Wright Brothers
Ran a bicycle business.
It is the 100th anniversary of the
Glider they flew at Kitty
Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903.
Their first flight stayed in the air for 12 seconds.

Bat, the toy plane with rubber band motor got them
Ready and interested in flying.
Orville flew the glider in that first flight.
Thirty minutes is how long they later flew
High above the ground.
Everyone now
Remembers them
Since they were first to fly in a plane.

Last but not least was a review of information about the Wright Brothers with matching, concentration and hidden words