More on airplanes

Today’s book: “The Glorious Flight across the Channel with Louis Bleriot” by Alice and Martin Provensen

Reflecting on our PAF museum trip, today we continued the topic of flying and airplanes - we read a book about a Frenchman Louis Bleriot, who was the first one to fly across the English Channel.

The book says: “Louis Bleriot (1872-1936) was one of the truly great pioneers of aviation. He devoted the fortune acquired by his invention of an automobile searchlight to the development and construction of his high-performance aircraft, the “BLERIOT XI”. His flight across the English Channel (we got to know that this is not a TV channel but a water body running between to parts of land) demonstrated to the world that barriers of land and sea no longer existed for
the airplane.”

The story of the book goes as follows: On a nice outing with his family, Mr. Bleriot notices in the sky above his native town of Cambrai an airship! This inspires him to build his own airplane. Over years, he makes several attempts – 11 to be exact – to build his own plane and finally succeeds. Mr. Bleriot and his “BLERIOT XI” participate in a challenge to fly across the English Channel with a prize of £ 1,000 offered for it. He sets out on early morning of July 25, 1909, almost gets lost at the sea but 37 minutes after taking off, he finally lands on English soil! Mr. Bleriot wins the prize!

After the story, we made airplanes of our own: a darting one and a gliding one. Darting one has a sharp front and streamlined, smooth body – it flies far and fast. Gliding one has a flat front and wider wings – it flies slowly and gracefully. We talked about the differences in the design of these
planes and why they fly the way they do. In the picture below, you can see some of our darts and gliders.

PAF museum field trip

Instead of our regular book club session, today we had a really awesome field trip to Pakistan Air Force museum. Although nearly all of us had been there already, visiting PAF is always fun: lots of huge planes and other machinery on display, plenty of space to run and, of course, rides to enjoy. First, we followed the track around the models displayed outside. Then we entered the Archives building, where more planes were displayed, along with guns, shields, uniforms and historical accounts with photos - the place was huge! Afterwards, we all sat down for some snacks our moms had brought along and finally went for the rides! The all popular choice was the dodgeing cars, which many of us tried even multiple times. Smaller kids went in a miniature train and the flying airplane. To enjoy some of what we did in the museum, click here to check out the photos.

Planet Earth - part 2

Since today was the first Wednesday of February and we previously had agreed to have National Georaphic "Planet Earth" video's viewing sessions on every first Wednesday of the month, we did just that. The hour long viewing session and sitting in one spot was not easy, but the video was worth it, Alhamduillah. Afterwards, we had our snacks and good running around aunty's Atefa's home. :) Aunty Najia had prepard for us a game - pin the tale on the horse - which we really enojoyed.

In today's "show-and-tell" session, Sulaiman shared the very first letters he had learned in Arabic, Masha'Allah. As his ummi was holding up flash-cards, he was saying the sounds of the letters for all of us.