CHATSWORTH : Imagination Takes Flight on ‘Air Friday’

There was a time when tossing a paper airplane during a school lesson brought on a world of trouble. Yet when 7-year-old Garine Tomassian did just that at Sierra Canyon School on Friday, she got encouragement instead of a reprimand.

“Good job, Garine,” assistant teacher Scott Deaver said. “That one went really far. All right, who’s next?”

Have times changed? They have in the eyes of Sierra Canyon School officials. And, in an effort to prepare students for more changes, they coordinated a series of exercises demonstrating one aspect of a developing world: flight.

Designated as “Air Friday,” the event involved 10 activities focusing on air movement, centrifugal force, propulsion and flight simulation. Through these exercises, students at Sierra Canyon learned about the fundamentals of air and space travel.

Some activities, like Garine’s paper airplane, involved direct application of a few basic principles of flight. Others, such as a CD-ROM computer program called “Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Ultimate Robot,’ ” portrayed what a world dominated by high-tech instruments could be like.

“We’re trying to give our students a look into the future and an idea of how we got where we are,” said Sierra Canyon curriculum coordinator Ann Gillinger. “Through these exercises, they can experience the baby steps our greatest scientists took in achieving what are now very great accomplishments.”

While some students whirled string-tethered paper cups filled with water around their heads to learn about centrifugal force, others pumped air into water tubes connected to “water rockets” that shot into the air when released.

Five-year-old Daniel Herman giggled as a stream of water backfired on his shirt as his water rocket went skyward.

“This is my favorite game,” he said. “It’s like a Coke bottle.”

Not all students, though, were as enthusiastic about the exercises they confronted. Garine Tomassian crawled into a plastic “space bubble” set up to simulate the confines of a real space capsule and immediately complained.

“It’s boiling hot in here,” she said, ignoring art teacher Janet Rosen’s tale about encountering creatures on other planets.

Yet, it wasn’t long before her mind drifted to the places mentioned in Rosen’s story. “I want to go to Jupiter,” she said, “because it has all those pretty rings.”

“Kids have a greater tendency to use their imaginations,” computer teacher Brett Kerner said. “You can learn a lot about a particular project by watching them experiment with it in new ways.”