I Think that the most important key to success is getting exposure.  “Creating your own rocket” was a hands on project experience to enrich the students abilities to deal with purchasing merchandise, calculating percentages with tax, working creatively and exploring Newton’s third law of physics. 

The initial idea came about by brainstorming ways that the kids could do a project that involved using their common sense while at the same time dealing with money to bring the curriculum entitled “dollars and sense” alive. This is only one of the many project based learning activities that we do here at the Roberts Family Development Center.  For more information about open court themes for

Sacramento Unified School District, it is possible to visit CORAL Connect on the Internet. We started off by assigning responsibilities to each student to bring supplies from home.  This worked as a way to reinforce the idea that projects can be done in any environment with readily available resources.  As we were collecting the supplies we also conducted research on the NASA website for kids.  We studied and read up on the different designs that rockets can take, the planets, and current projects NASA is working on like the trip to Mars.

Once all of the supplies were gathered I opened up “The Rocket Shop.”  Each child was given one million RFDC dollars and had to buy all of the parts to the rocket.  After they had put all of their parts together they had to add it up, figure out the tax, give me the cashier the tax and receive their change.  During this process the concept of tax was taught to them.  They learned how to multiply decimal numbers and subtract it from the total in order to come up with how much of their money was going towards tax.  The concept of tax, where it came from and why we have it was also explained.

Here came the fun part!  Each child was able to draft the design of their own rocket, then as groups applied it to the final product.  Lastly a touch of creativity was added to individualize the rockets with paints, streamers, names, etc.  Once this was finished I got to explain how the rockets would launch however in order to do so we needed to learn about Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of physics.  His law states that “to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction, or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and are directly opposite.”  In other words, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  To illustrate this I used the analogy of a balloon.  When a balloon is blown up there is pressure in it, and when the balloon is let go it releases pressure making it propel through the air.  Therefore increasing the pressure inside the bottle rocket it is able to produce a greater thrust and in essence “take-off.”

Entitled “dollars and sense” this open court theme was brought to life with the Bottle Rocket project.  The goals of this project were to introduce the kids to concepts of physics as well as teach them how to manage money.  This project enabled the students to grasp these complex ideas in a way that made it fun for them.  The resources that were provided to us by the GenCorp Foundation made this an exciting project that could not have happened without their support.  The enthusiasm of the kids coupled with their newly learned resource management ensured the success of the Bottle Rocket take-offs.