This lesson emerged when the children received an e-mail from the Kindergarten students at the Northwest Early Childhood Center in Detroit, Michigan. After using the projector to display the e-mail on the large screen at group time and reading it together, we worked together to compose a reply letter in Microsoft Word. The content of the letter was composed by giving each child an opportunity to share an idea and by posing the question, "Do you know what makes things fly through the air?" to our new friends.


Lesson Two - Sharing our Creations with Microsoft Power Point

This lesson came forth after Mrs. Filipiak and I observed the children using our project center, which contains many different open-ended recyclable materials, to create objects that move through the air. The children were producing creations so quickly and taking them home that we were having a hard time documenting their ideas. To  give the children an opportunity to share their ideas, build their self-image and confidence and learn from each other, I developed a slide show in Microsoft Power Point that displayed digital photographs of the children with their creations and provided space for a teacher to record their ideas while they shared at group time.


Lesson Three - Making a KWL Chart with Kidspiration

After teaching many lessons that dealt with the concept of flight, I felt it was necessary to stop and summarize what we had already learned or knew and what we still wanted to find out. To help the children organize their ideas and create a plan for the future of our project, we used the KWL chart on the Kidspiration software. At the end of our project, we revisited this chart and added what we learned.


Lesson Four - Using Kid Pix to Represent our Ideas

Since the children shared so many interesting ideas in the making of our KWL chart in lesson three, I decided that they were ready for me to provide them with a means to begin representing their ideas.  Since the children had many opportunities to explore the Kid Pix Deluxe software over the semester and enjoy using it, I decided to use this familiar piece of software as both a motivator and tool and invited each of them to use it to demonstrate their understanding of how things move through the air.


Lesson Five - Revisiting our Representations

After reviewing their Kid Pix representations, I noticed that the children had many different ideas about how things moved through the air. They seemed to recognize that there are different components to something being able to move through the air, but still had not made many connections between them. To help them make some of these connections, we did several different lessons involving a fan moving objects and a blow dryer moving a Ping Pong ball. After reviewing documentation from these lessons, the children's connections had improved, but were still not as strong as I had hoped. To strengthen their understanding, I created another slide show using Microsoft Power Point that included digital photographs from prior lessons, as well as scanned images of paper and pencil representations by several children that we reviewed by projecting the show on the large screen at group time.


Lesson Six - Researching Flight on the Internet

To solidify the children's understandings and clear up any misconceptions they had at the end of the semester, we used the Internet and the projector to check out several websites that provided information about how things fly or move through the air in a child-friendly manner. We read through information, participated in simulations and manipulated illustrations to help the children make connections and gain more valid understandings.


Lesson Seven - Writing Back to our Friends Across Town

After I was confident that the children had a good grasp on the concept of flight, I used the projector and Microsoft Word to share the e-mail reply that their friends from Northwest Early Childhood Center had sent to them. Since this reply included their responses to the question we posed about how things move through the air, we read the letter together and discussed the validity of their responses. After our discussion, I  gave each child an opportunity to share their understandings about how things move through the air, which provided the content of our reply back to our friends. Thus, this last lesson gave my children an opportunity to summarize thier understandings and use their knowledge to teach others.