Paper airplane designs for kids

Activity: Make Paper Airplanes

Got a dreary November Saturday on your hands? Might be a good day to make paper airplanes. Most designs are easy to make, and following the instructions for folding the planes helps develop kids' spatial reasoning abilities.  Once the planes are folded, you can hold flight contests, compare designs, or develop the perfect throwing technique. Or check out the physics of paper airplanes courtesy of the Exploratorium.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/exploring/paper/airplanes.html (it's a two-page article - click on the "next" button at the bottom to see the rest.)

Find cool paper airplane designs at Alex's Paper Airplanes (and I apologize for recommending a site with so many ads, but it's really a great site - even includes throwing tips for each design):

http://www.paperairplanes.co.uk/

If you don't want to do quite so much folding, you might prefer Ken Blackburn's Home Page. Ken Blackburn holds the Guinness record for paper airplane time aloft (27.6 seconds). This site has color airplanes you can download, print, cut out, fold, and assemble. The site also has information about paper-airplane aerodynamics.

http://www.paperplane.org/