Jugami Elementary Science · Grades K-5

Flight with Amelia

How do birds, kites and planes stay up in the sky? Let's find out together!

Hi, I'm Amelia, your flight teacher! I love everything that flies.

Pick a lesson, play a game, and buckle up. We are going up!

Pick a lesson

Lesson 1

How Things Fly

Lift, weight, thrust and drag, with birds, bees, kites, paper airplanes and the Wright brothers. Play Force Finder and take the quiz!
Coming soon

More flight lessons

More flying adventures are on the way. Check back soon!

Warm-up game: Sky Spotter

Everything that flies needs lift, a push up. But fliers get their lift in different ways!

How to play: press Start. Look at the flier in the sky. How does it get its lift? Tap or click a button, or press a number key from 1 to 5. There are 6 rounds.

Press Start to spot some fliers!

The game needs JavaScript turned on. Here are the answers to talk about: birds and bees flap their wings. Helicopters spin their blades. Hot-air balloons use hot air. Kites use the wind and a string. Planes use wings that zoom fast through the air.

Why is my name Amelia?

I am named after Amelia Earhart, a famous American pilot. In 1932, she flew all alone across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. She was the first woman ever to do that!

Her bright red plane now belongs to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. You can learn more about her in Lesson 1.

For grown-ups

Flight with Amelia is a set of short science lessons for grades K-5, written at about a grade 2-4 reading level, so children can read along or press "Read it to me" and listen. Each lesson ends with a game that works with a keyboard and a short quiz. The facts come from NASA's learning pages and the Smithsonian (the National Air and Space Museum and its How Things Fly site), and every page lists its sources at the bottom so you can look things up together. One thing we are careful about is lift: we explain it the way NASA Glenn Research Center does (a wing pushes air down, and the air pushes the wing up), not with the popular "equal transit time" story, which NASA calls incorrect. All the drawings are original. No ads and no tracking.

Sources

Facts on this page were checked against:

NASA: What Is Aerodynamics? (Grades K-4) (lift for planes, helicopters, hot-air balloons and kites)
Smithsonian How Things Fly: How do birds fly? and How do bees fly? (flapping wings; 230 wing beats a second)
NASA: What Is a Helicopter? (Grades K-4) (rotor blades are spinning wings)
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: Lockheed Vega 5B, Amelia Earhart (her 1932 solo nonstop Atlantic flight; the plane is in the museum)

Credits: Words, drawings and game by Amelia for the Jugami School Elementary Science Department. All art is original, hand-made SVG; Amelia is a friendly cartoon teacher, not a portrait. No ads and no tracking. Your game and quiz answers stay on this page.