Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Aviation Fans Celebrate First Flight, 12/15/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec03/flight_12-15.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Have you ever flown in an airplane? What was it like?

2. What would life be like without airplanes?

3. When was the airplane invented?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Other than flight and aviation, what were the Wright brothers' interests?

Fascination with mechanical things led the Wright brothers to build a printing press and publish several local newspapers, including the West Side News and the Dayton Tattler.

The brothers also took advantage of the popularity of bicycles to start their own repair shop, where they designed and sold their own models. It was in their bicycle shop that they started building models -- one of which would later become the Wright Flyer.

2. What significant development occurred in 1899 to help the Wright brothers? Why was it significant?

In August 1899, the brothers built a two-winged kite with a 5-foot wingspan and fixed tail. They were concerned with controlling a flying structure, rather than stability or propulsion, which ended up being the key to their success.

They discovered that the wings could be warped, or twisted, to make the structure roll from one side to the other in a controlled manner. They tested this design on the kite, using ropes pulled from the ground. On subsequent gliders and aircraft, they used cables that the pilot operated. Other early aircraft designers would use this breakthrough technique known as wing warping.

3. Describe the Wright flyer.

The two-winged biplane had two propellers and a four-cylinder engine. The craft had a 40-foot-4-inch wingspan and weighed about 750 pounds with the pilot.

4. Who made the first successful flight? How long was it? What was the pilot's reaction?

On Dec. 14, Wilbur made the first attempt, lying on his stomach in a hip cradle that he moved to help guide the airplane. The flyer rolled down a trolley rail to gain speed and then sailed into the air for a few seconds before it stalled and dropped to the sand.

The brothers fixed the plane and tried again Dec. 17. It was Orville's turn. The flyer soared into the air and traveled 120 feet for 12 seconds, marking the first controlled, piloted, powered flight.

He wrote in his journal: "This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started."

5. Where is the Wright flyer now?

The actual 1903 Wright flyer is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. How is your life impacted by aviation? How might the world be different if air travel had never been created?

2. What are some recent inventions that have affected your life? Explain.

3. What other inventions have affected life in the U.S. as much as airplanes?

4. Research the history of aviation. Who were some of the significant aviation pioneers?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.