SMART LIST #11: Flights of Fancy

I’m a nervous flyer, but give me a book about flight, and I’ll be happy for hours. So many wonderful flight-themed books have been written for kids, and the topic can be stretched in countless directions so it’s possible to match some form of flight story to just about any child. Think dragons, airships, famous pilots, inventors, kites, hot air balloons, WWII fighter planes. Teachers could easily create dynamite integrated units on flight, incorporating fiction and nonfiction works: science, history, poetry and fantasy.

So here’s a list of a bunch of my favourite flight books, a smattering of fiction and nonfiction, picture books and chapter books. There are some captivating adventures stories here, some imagined, some true:

Fiction – Chapter Books
Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space – Philip Reeve
Airborn and Skybreaker – Kenneth Oppel
Airman – Eoin Colfer
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment – James Patterson
Flight from Big Tangle – Anita Daher
The Desert Hawk: The Story of Stocky Edwards, WWII Flying Ace – Barbara Hehner
His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Novik

Fiction – Picture Books
Wing Shop – Elvira Woodruff
Tuesday – David Wiesner
The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot – Alice & Martin Provensen

Non-Fiction – Picture Books
Kids’ Paper Airplane Book – Ken Blackburn
Animals in Flight – Robin Page
Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride – Pam Munoz Ryan
Hot Air: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Hot Air Balloon Ride – Marjorie Priceman
Airborne: A Photobiography of Wilbur and Orville Wright – Mary Collins