Airplane Activities for Preschool

Mondays have been tough around here – these summer weekends are busy and we’re feeling it by Monday! I hope that you’ll forgive me for not always getting a Monday post up throughout the summer, I’m really leaning into Mom life and sometimes that just doesn’t leave the time. That doesn’t mean that I’m totally leaving you hanging though! I’ve got so much to share. We’re prepping for a vacation, and it’s a big one because it’ll be my daughter’s first airplane experience. This felt like the perfect time to dig in and explore airplanes. It’s relevant for my family at the moment, but it can be an excellent theme for the classroom too.

So many young children are fascinated by planes, and it’s totally understandable – something that large that can FLY?! Exploring airplanes is an amazing way to introduce engineering and basic scientific concepts. This can also be an opportunity to look at social factors related to flying on a plane, like going through security, packing a suitcase, respecting others on the plane, etc.

Here are some of the activities that we’re using to support our learning this week:

This video from the Federal Aviation Administration gives kids the absolute basics for what their first time in an airport will be like. It’s super short – which is excellent for little ones with short attention spans – and it shows real images and examples of young children doing all of the airport related things.

We’re also crafting and flying paper airplanes. When doing this in the classroom I definitely suggest encouraging children to color their planes so that there isn’t any confusion about who each plane belongs to. We also like to measure how far the paper airplanes fly and do a little hypothesizing about factors that might influence their flight patterns. This video walks children through folding a super easy paper airplane.

An airport is something that you really have to experience to understand. While security makes it nearly impossible for children to explore a large international airport without a plane ticket, smaller, regional airports might be a little more accommodating for a field trip. It never hurts to ask!

One of the best ways to interact with airplanes in daily life is to get outside and look up. Making a record of the airplanes that fly overhead, and their flight patterns, is a great way to practice data collection and simple analysis. You could also plot local airports on a map and see if you can identify where these planes might be flying out of or into.