Paper Airplane Math: The Perfect STEM Activity for Homeschoolers

Graphing comes to life with this fun paper airplane math activity! Create, fly, collect data, and use technology for serious learning that will motivate your elementary and middle school children to love learning.

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Paper Airplane Graphs

Grab some colorful paper and let your children have fun designing paper airplanes to test their awesomeness. After collecting data, your children will learn so much by creating a variety of graphs.

Target Age Range:  Upper Elementary – Middle School

This lesson paper airplane math activity is so much fun!

Skills Covered:  measurement, record keeping, averages, graphing, technology, keyboarding, writing, art, invention

1. Have your child design several different paper airplanes.

2. Give each plane a name.

3. Go outside with the planes and a measuring tape.

4. Throw and measure each plane three times from the same spot. Note the three measurements for each plane.

5. Determine the average flight measurement of each plane. (Add all three measurements for each plane together and divide by 3 to find the average.)

6. Use one of my favorite FREE websites, Create A Graph, to transfer the average flight of each plane to various graphs.

{Bar Graph}

{Line Graph}

{Circle Graph or Pie Graph}

The final graphs can be saved to your computer and printed. They look so fantastic, don’t they? Have fun playing with Create A Graph!

More Graphing Activities

I’ve had so much graphing fun with my children over the years. Here are some more ideas!

   

 

Learn More About Living Math

The paper plane graphing activity is a beautiful example of living math. Children can understand and enjoy mathematics concepts through fun, challenging, real-life, and meaningful activities like this. If you want to learn more about incorporating living math into your homeschool, enjoy the living math how-to book or masterclass linked below. Both are easy to understand and will get you on the fast track to adding meaningful math to your homeschool!

Picture Books About Graphing

Any time you can add a literature connection to another subject, it’s good! These books can help you solidify an understanding of how to graph and read data from graphs – both essential skills for math and science.

 

Feel free to share pictures of your family’s paper plane graphs on social media and tag me @OurJourneyWestward!