Dr. Bertrand Piccard and his co-pilot, Brian Jones, made history in March 1999 by completing an around the world journey in a hot air balloon. Their trip took 19 days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes, beating all previous records for distance and duration.

For Dr. Piccard, hot air ballooning has become a metaphor for life. It is the symbol of a new relationship between man, technology and nature. The series of lessons in Balloon-atics will help students to begin to understand this new relationship and the science concepts involved.

You have chosen to have your class participate in a real hot air balloon flight. The Balloon-atics unit is interdisciplinary in nature. Building tissue paper hot air hot air balloons integrates several curricular areas including mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies. Students will use cooperative learning techniques and will develope problem solving stratagies to improve and enhance their skills. During this unit the students will:

• Brainstorming
• Collaborating
• Communicating
• Cooperating
• Demonstrating
• Discussing
• Hypothesizing
• Identifying
• Observing
• Predicting
• Reflecting
• Reasoning
• Researching

TARGET: (Levels 5-8) can be adapted to any grade level.

• Students will brainstorm in small groups to decide what is involved in preparing a hot air balloon for flight.
• Students will discuss their ideas about a ballooning crew and safety issues among their group members.
• Students will prepare their information to share in a class discussion.

• The teacher needs to have some information on ballooning before the lesson is introduced to the class. Go to the Hot Air Ballooning website and print out the information you need. After you open up the main site, look for subheadings to guide you.

To begin your mini unit on hot air balloons, decorate your room with pictures of different types of hot air balloons and other pictures of flight. A couple of great books are Lighter than Air Flight by Steven A. Bachmeyer and Flight from Time Life Books. There are many available resources for you to use at the library and on the Internet.

Once your students have an idea about what hot air balloons are, divide them into groups of about 3-4 students per group. Explain to the class that although hot air ballooning looks seemingly effortless and graceful, a great deal of hard work goes into preparing for lift off.

Once the students are in their groups, ask them to think about the following questions written on the board:

Give the students about 15 minutes to discuss and brainstorm the answers within their groups. Have them write their ideas on their dry erase boards. This is a self-discovery activity. Encourage your students to answer the questions. Walk around and facilitate the brainstorming by giving them clues if they are having trouble.

Once the students have answered the questions and discussed their ideas within their groups, have each group share their ideas with the others in the class. This activity should lead to a great discussion. Schedule at least 15 minutes for the discussion. Begin sharing answers if your students have not touched on the main ideas. Because this activity is very open ended, you can mold the discussion to go in any direction. Many students find it fascinating that balloonists have to watch for transmission lines and support structures while navigating. Balloonists should always suspect power lines along roads. Did you know that the propane used to fire the burner on the balloon has a boiling temperature of —44F? The pilots have to wear protective leather or Normex gloves when handling the fuel system, from the time it enters the hoses, through the flight, until they disassemble the system and refuel. Have you ever heard of balloon traffic? At festivals, pilots listen carefully for burner noise and look for balloon shadows on the ground in order to avoid an unwanted collision with another balloon.

These are just a few facts you can share with your students. We recommend that you do a little research on ballooning so you can answer your students’ questions. Once you start, you may get hooked on ballooning, too.

Walk around the room and make sure all the students are staying on task. The dry erase board activity and class discussion are great ways to observe student learning. For the teacher, it’s immediate feedback on class participation and cooperative learning.

SOURCES: Hot Air Ballooning website

• Students will develop questions and ideas to initiate and refine research.
• Students will explain their reasoning and identify information used to support the conclusions in their presentations
• Students will use the Internet and library as resources for their research

Explain to the students that they are going to get their first experience of what it is like to be a balloonist. Before each group begins their mission, it is a balloonist tradition to say "The balloonist Prayer":

The sun has held you in his warm hands

You have flown so high and so well

That Nature has joined you in your laughter

And set you gently back down

Into the loving arms of mother Earth.

Evaluate your teams by using the scoring guide you have developed or have the teams evaluate each other with the guidance of the scoring guide. A great way to ensure that the students are following good audience behaviors is to make them responsible for learning other groups’ information. You can have them take notes or write in a journal about what they have learned during this activity.

Lesson 3

TITLE: Flight

SOURCES: Lighter Than Air Flight by Steven A. Bachmeyer, Flight an activity book by Nancy Rogers Bosse, The Nature Company Discoveries Library: Flight by Time Life Books and the Greatest Paper Airplane website

(http://web.zdnet.com/zdtv/internettonight/download/story/0%2C462%2C2280512%2C00.html).

TARGET: (Levels 5-8) can be adapted to any grade level

• Students will observe a lab demonstrating how a hot air balloon works
• Students will hypothesize why the balloon inflates and deflates
• Students will demonstrate the principles of flight by making paper airplanes

• 1 plastic or glass soda bottle
• Bowl
• Ice cubes
• Hot water- not boiling
• 1 regular sized balloon (the kind at birthday parties)
• Enough paper for your class to make at least 2 paper airplanes
• Paper Airplane website or a book on how to make different types of paper airplanes

This is an easy experiment to help students understand how a hot air balloon works. When air is heated it expands. A hot air balloon has a gas burner to heat the air inside. When a balloon is filled with hot air, it becomes lighter than the air around it and it floats up. The experiment takes about 10 minutes.

1. Place a small deflated balloon over the mouth of an empty bottle.
2. Stand the bottle with the deflated balloon attached to the top of the bottle in a bowl and fill with hot water. Ask your students what is happening. (Air expands when heated, so the balloon will inflate.)
3. Pour out the hot water and fill the bowl with ice. What happens? (When the air is cooled by the ice, it contracts and needs less space; so the balloon begins to deflate.)
4. Have your students diagram or draw their observations and explain in their own words what is happening. This is a great way to get your students thinking about flight. Now lets explore the other principles of flight.

Have you ever wondered what makes paper airplanes stay in the air or even real airplanes for that matter? The answer is Lift. Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss scientist, discovered that moving air has less pushing power than still air. Bernoulli’s Principle states the higher the speed of a flowing fluid or gas, the lower the pressure. As the speed decreases, the pressure increases. This can explain the lift of an airplane wing.

Allow students to demonstrate Bernoulli’s principal by making paper airplanes. There is a wonderful website called Greatest Paper Airplanes, that will show your students different kinds of airplanes to make or you can let them experiment on designing their own. The students will begin to realize that streamlined shapes will have less drag and glide more easily through the air. Real planes have propellers or engines that allow them to keep moving forward. Tell the students that the driving force of their airplane comes from the movement of them throwing their airplane into the air. This force is similar to the engine that drives a real plane.

To make it a little more interesting, place take-off lines and targets around the room for the students to aim at. The better built (or folded) the plane, the farther and more controlled it will glide. Give the students prizes or points for hitting the targets.

Walk around the room and make sure the students understand lift, thrust and drag. Have them explain or demonstrate what makes their plane fly. At the end of the class period, have students write their conclusions as to why their plane flew or didn’t

SOURCES: Model Hot Air Balloon Mathematics website

http://www.overflight.com/thermo.html

TARGET: can be adapted to fit any grade level.

• Students will track the movement of the hot air balloon on a map of the St. Louis area
• Students will use their knowledge of balloon flight to predict the distance, duration and height the balloon traveled
• Students will reflect on their ballooning experiences and write a "Balloonist Reflection"

Your students can now be a part of hot air balloon journey. Your class can track the movement of a real hot air balloon! After the balloon lifts-off the ground, your students can use their prior knowledge about balloons to help them make their own predictions about where the balloon will go. You may want to do this as a whole class activity or let each student complete his or her own data chart.

After the ballooning event has ended and all the student data charts are complete, have the students write their own balloonist prayer, poem or story. The students should reflect on their experiences up to this point. Allow students to draw pictures, cartoons etc… You may want to read the "Balloonist Prayer" to the students to help them get started. Student’s imaginations will soar like a hot air balloon.