By Julia Beauregard
Hometown Weekly Editor
Dover children flocked to the community room in the Dover Town Library last Wednesday to learn about the principles of flight, through constructing paper airplanes, rockets, and catapults.
“Today, we have three opportunities to learn how to fly!” Yvette Sammarco from Walpole Coordinated Family Community Engagement Grant Program excitedly shared with the children after they had settled in their seats. “We’re going to see how these crafts work and learn how they fly!”
The program was designed to have the children use their critical thinking skills in order to understand how and why these different devices operate the way they do and what effects their creation and functionality.
Sammarco asked the children questions about airplanes, rockets, and catapults to gauge what they already knew about the different flying contraptions. The children confidently shared their responses, and some of the children built their responses off of the answers of their peers.
Each of the three activities began with the children watching a video related to the means of flight in their craft. The videos were directly related to the questions that Sammarco had asked regarding why planes can’t fly into space and how rockets are able to work. The children quietly observed each of the videos, looking for the answers to the questions that Sammarco had proposed.
After the videos had concluded, the children diligently worked on their craft, with the assistance of Sammarco, Mikki Cataloni, who is also a part of the Walpole CFCE program, and other adults in the room.
Once the children had completed their craft, Sammarco asked the children for their predictions on if and how their different crafts would fly. The children provided thoughtful responses for their predictions, before testing out their devices.
All the children tossed their airplanes through the air with excitement, watching the paper planes soar through the community room. The kids walked to different spaces in the room to test out their planes from various places and angles.
While the children learned many different principles of flight and how to craft these different devices, it was plain to see that the children were most excited to learn how to fly.
