One of the reasons I am excited about homeschooling the boys is that I will get to see the joy in their faces as they learn or try something new…  The joy on EJ’s face when he realized H was for helicopter, and more importantly, his momma knew how to make helicopters… ah, this is one of the faces I hope I can remember in the middle of a tantrum.

Remember those twirly-helicopter-things from when you were a child?  I thought I did, too – until the ones I cut didn’t fly.  They just kind of flopped.  So I tried folding up the bottom – still flopping – then I added a paper clip to the bottom as well.  That worked beautifully (I also tried not folding the bottom up and just using the paper clip, but they didn’t do as well as both folding and paper-clipping)!  When I finally looked this activity up online, I saw that many other sites recommend some extra cuts and some extra folds on the bottom half of the helicopter – I didn’t want to mess with all that “extra” work, and my simple version worked very well!

I cut up, folded, and paper-clipped a nice little pile of them to try to save me from having to bend over to pick one up every. single. time.

Then, using extreme caution, I stood EJ up on a chair in the kitchen and let him at it.  Really, I was quite careful – I was next to him the entire time…. I thought he might have more fun if the helicopters flew from higher up.  And he did – have tons of fun, I mean. 

I think in this picture he was making helicopter sounds or something similar. 

OK, so I was standing right next to him the whole time, except when I was laying on the floor. 

 We had so much fun playing with these helicopters.  We even had helicopter races!  I think this would be a really fun activity for older children, too – perhaps to experiment with the shape of the helicopters, as well as the amount of weight more paper clips would add to them.  We’ll file this one away to come back to in several more years. 

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