On December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the Flyer, an airplane they built themselves with an engine and two propellers. Orville flew first, 120 feet in 12 seconds, at about 10:35 in the morning. The brothers took turns, and by noon Wilbur had flown 852 feet in 59 seconds into a strong wind of more than 20 miles an hour. Before they built airplanes, the brothers built and sold bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. Today a stone marks where the Flyer took off and four numbered markers show where each flight landed, and the Flyer itself is in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Six pages built on the real numbers of the four flights. Page 1 gives the flights in a table: who flew, how far and how long, with six questions to add and subtract. Page 2 marks where each flight landed on two number lines, one counted in 5s and one in 10s beside a football field, then rounds each distance to the nearest 10 and 100 feet. Page 3 reads the clock times Orville wrote in his diary and finds the time between the flights on a time line. Page 4 changes the flights to yards and feet and the Flyer's size to inches. Page 5 divides each flight's feet by its seconds with long division and remainders. Page 6 has six flight stories. Pages 1 to 3 suit 3rd grade, page 4 4th grade and page 5 5th grade; the first problem on each page is a worked example.
Take the class outside or to a long hallway and measure 120 feet with a tape measure or a 10-foot rope: that was the whole first flight. Then pace out 852 feet, or as far as you can, to feel the difference. Before page 3, count 12 seconds and then 59 seconds out loud together. Page 5 uses 2-digit divisors, so 4th graders can do flight 1 (120 ÷ 12) and leave the rest; 5th graders check each answer by multiplying and adding the remainder.
Fold a paper airplane and fly it in a hallway or a yard. Measure each flight with a tape measure or count your steps, write the distances down, and work out how many of your flights it would take to go as far as the Wright brothers' first flight of 120 feet.
Math from the four flights Orville and Wilbur Wright made on December 17, 1903, the first flights of an airplane with an engine and a pilot. Students compare the flights in feet and seconds, mark where each one landed, read the clock times, change feet to yards and inches, divide to find the feet each second and solve flight stories.
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