Racing Airplanes

Just days after last school year ended, we packed all of our earthly belongings into a moving truck and crossed four state lines following a wonderful career opportunity. Despite the boxes to unpack and the friends left behind, I was determined to pack our summer with many fun and educational activities.

To kick off our summer of fun, we headed to the library and checked out a number of books about our new home state - fun right? We learned about the Civil War and gold mining, NASCAR and bluegrass. It was the Wright brothers, though that ultimately captured my young sons' curiousities. The history of flight lends itself well to lessons across many subject areas. We read biographies. We did physics experiments. We even incorporated some math comparing flight times and speeds to current aircraft technologies.

Being summer, our lesson time quickly evolved into play. I encouraged the boys to experiment with different paper airplane folding techniques. We decorated each plane and headed outside to test them out. After several test runs, their competitive spirits kicked in. The "M Glider," aptly named for its shape, flew the longest routes and did the best tricks. It was the best candidate of all our airplanes for a game of paper-airplane-frisbee-golf.

The rules:

Each player takes turns to throw their paper airplane onto one of five frisbee bases.

Frisbees are positioned flat and upside-down (or bowl-side-up) on the lawn or on play structures in the yard.

Players take turns to throw their airplanes onto same bases in the same order taking as many throws as needed to get on the base.

Each throw is worth one point.

The player with the lowest score at the end of the game wins.

The kids had a great time creating this game and spent hours refining the rules. What new, and maybe silly games have you and your family created in your own backyard?

Need more great ideas for games to play in your backyard? Check out our Backyard Games Pinterest board!

There are many more ideas across the blogosphere. Check out the Outside Game link up over at Inspiration Lboratories: