It’s Friday, which means only one more day until Saturday, which I love because it rhymes with Hatterspray and Fatterjay.
But while it’s still today, I’m excited to share my favorite submissions from Hot Air Balloon Week! As usual, you guys sent us so much incredible stuff. I hardly know where to begin.
Let’s start with some drawings.
Here is one from Thalia:
I love the colors you chose, Thalia. The pink balloon against the orange sky…just beautiful. I also like the affirming happy faces floating in the sky to either side and above the balloon. If one is going to go ballooning, it is best to have an approving sky nearby.
Here is Phoebe’s drawing:
It appears that Phoebe will not be flying alone. No, indeed. She seems to have made room for Thalia, Mumma, and Homer, and maybe some others. I can’t quite tell. Fortunately, her basket is big and looks rather comfortable. And the large heart on the side of the ballon gives me the sense that this is going to be a friendly flight. I only wish that I could come along.
On Wednesday, we asked a question: If you could take a hot air balloon ride, where would you go and who would you take with you? LOTS of you had ideas about this one:
Kato: I would take every one of my friends, even Baba. I would go to China and California.
I am Kato’s dad, but am I one of his friends? It’s not clear. I truly hope so. I would like to go to China.
Alden: I would go to Ireland. I would take my family and Mary Jane and Madeline and Quinten and Bryn Margaret and Lily and Gabby. I would also bring Isabella (my doll) and her sheep.
I am assuming that I, as Alden’s father, am included in the “family” category. So perhaps I will finally get to have my own hot air balloon ride. I wish, however, that I had been consulted before the sheep was invited.
Harvey: I would like to take my whole family on a hot air balloon ride to Taiwan to visit my Gong-Gong and Poa-Poa (maternal grandparents).
Only three kids in, and we have two trips to China planned. The age of globalization is truly upon us. I wonder if these guys know how long it’s going to take to get there. And how seldom we’ll have the chance to stop for donuts as we cross the Pacific. What kind of snacks are you planning on bringing, Harvey? May I suggest beef jerky?
Harry: I will take my Ralphie (stuffed animal dog), my Research Dinosaur, and Harvey, Mommy, Daddy, and Halvard on a hot air balloon to the jungle because that’s where Ralphie wants to go. We will fly by Texas and fly by Sea World in San Antonio.
A well-considered trip, Harry. I approve of your route and your plan to bring a researcher along. The jungle is full of undiscovered species. If you identify any new species, can you please name at least one of them after me?
Harvey: I will take Harry on my hot air balloon to Sochi. (Harvey REALLY wants to submit another one!)
Not content to merely travel to China, Harvey is now planning a trip to Russia as well. Perhaps to get heavily discounted Olympics tchotchkes?
Anna: I don’t want to go on a hot air balloon, because they go too high, but if I did go on a hot air balloon, I would go to Paris with my daddy.
Anna, I completely identify with your aversion to heights. It’s why I seldom travel to the tops of ladders. Or stand on chairs. Or on my tip toes.
Phoebe: I want to go in a hot air balloon to Greece, and the balloon would go so fast, and I wouldn’t have to sit in an airplane for ten hours. I would take my whole family, and my dog, and my suitcase, and my backpack, and I would pack a telescope, binoculars, lotion, clothes, a bunch of toys, my animals, my lucky coin, and a big rainbow lollipop.
You kids are the most cosmopolitan balloon travelers I’ve ever met. If I got to go in a hot air balloon, I would ride it to the bathroom so I didn’t have to walk all the way. The bathroom is very far away. And my legs are tired.
Also, Phoebe, good thinking on bringing the lotion. Who knows if they have any in Greece. Also, I’m sorry to admit it, but I ate your lollipop.
Thalia: I would take a hot air balloon to Florida because I miss my aunt there and also because it’s warm there even in winter. And I would take ice cream and lemonade and a little pup with toys to go with it, and a penny to buy things, and a tiny tiny tiny tiny marble for good luck.
Thalia, you know what they say, the smaller the marble, the bigger the luck. I’m glad you’ve discovered this at such a young age. Also, if you bring ice cream, be sure to eat it in the first five minutes so that it doesn’t have a chance to melt in Florida. Also, you might want to bring at least two pennies, because of, you know, inflation.
In answer to the weekly question, Ian sent us this note:
And here is Ian’s balloon picture:
Ian, I just love your drawing. Everything about it is just right. The shape of the balloon. The curve of the sides. The sandbags hanging from the basket. The flame as it erupts from the burner. The only thing missing is a passenger. I’m assuming that you’re in there. Peeking over the side? Or perhaps curled up in the bottom of the basket, taking a nap and dreaming?
Here is Harvey’s story and picture for the week:
Once there were some angry birds and pigs. They go all over the world. One pig’s name is Little. He loves to go down the slide. He likes the slide. He did it when he was 20 years old. There is a bird that did the monkey bars. A hot air balloon carried them to their home. They did not see anything but clouds. Finally, little pig fell asleep and had the best dream ever.
Harvey, at first I thought your birds and pigs were bound for a fight, but I was glad to find that it was a peaceful story instead. How much more harmonious would our iPhones be if the pigs and birds spent all day playing on the playground together instead of knocking one another off of pedestals?
After much consideration, lengthy consultation with my large dog Iggy, and several bowls of cereal, I am ready to announce that…
…the winner of the week is… IAN!
…for his truly excellent drawing of the hot air balloon. And for referring to Robbi as “Miss Robbi.” Actually, I kind of wish he hadn’t done that because now Robbi wants me to call her Miss Robbi, too. (You can download your coloring page HERE, Ian!)
Thanks to all of you kids out there for sending us your stories and pictures about hot air balloons. We sure enjoyed the view.
Check back tomorrow for a new theme. It’s for the birds!
Hello everyone! It’s Tuesday again, which means it’s time for our DRAWING PROMPT!
Well, I had kind of the same problem that Matthew had writing his story yesterday. I started out making a drawing about a hot air balloon and it turned into a drawing about a whale. Kind of. A whale AND a hot air balloon. But mostly I’m interested in the whale. Anyway – here it is:
Matthew wrote up a very nice description for the ebay auction (if you’d like to own the original drawing, you can bid HERE):
Dream Beneath the Sea
To dream beneath the sea or fly above the clouds? Somewhere in the space between is all of us. This is an original pen and ink and watercolor piece by illustrator Robbi Behr, who has neither ridden in a hot air ballon nor rested in the belly of a whale. But she has stood on a pointy mountain top on a windy day, wondering whether she’s larger than a raindrop or impossibly small beneath the sky.
This illustration was drawn in response to the drawing prompt for Bobbledy Books’s theme of the week: Hot Air Balloons! Hang it above your bed and see what dreams bubble up. Drawn in pen and ink and gouache on Canson Mi-Teintes paper.
(I added the bit about hanging it above your bed.)
Here’s a black and white version for you to print out and color in, if you’d like:
So there you go! I can’t wait to see what all of YOU draw, and where you draw your hot air balloons (or whales!) heading. Post your drawings below in the comments, or instagram them using #bobbledyhotair to be entered to win an archival print of my drawing AND the right to be called Hot Air Balloon Expert and Champion of the Week (with your own color-in trophy to boot!). Go to it!
Hello, everyone. The theme of the week is hot air balloons, so I sat down and tried to write a story about hot air balloons. That didn’t happen. Not quite.
I did write a story that I like very much, but it’s not quite about hot air balloons. Instead, it’s about bubble gum that works kind of like a hot air balloon. I could try to explain, but maybe you should just read the story instead.
Three Lucky Things
By Matthew Swanson
Three good things happened to Fred on Monday morning.
1) He found a dollar on the sidewalk
2) He won a race to the corner against Billy, who was a big bully
3) He found another dollar on the sidewalk.
He went to school and learned about spelling, math, and social studies. After school, he went to the store and bought a lot of bubble gum, which he put in his mouth all at once.
Fred’s mouth was so full that he could barely chew the gum. Once it was all chewed up, he blew a bubble. It was huge. Just then, Billy the Bully walked by and tried to pop the bubble. The bubble burst, and when it did. Fred got completely covered with gum.
Billy felt a little bit bad for Fred, so he helped Fred wash all the gum off of himself. Fred thanked Billy and Billy decided to stop being a bully, once and for all.
Best friends now, Fred and Billy decided to go out and look for more dollars. They each found two dollars. They used their money to buy more gum. This time they both blew huge bubbles.
Just then, a huge gust of wind came along and lifted the bubbles. Instead of letting the bubbles go, they held on, and the wind blew the boys and the their bubbles across the ocean to Japan.
Once they landed in Japan, they ate a lot of noodles and learned how to speak Japanese. Once they learned how to speak Japanese, they got jobs working in a Japanese factory that made blenders.
Every afternoon, they boys went out on the street and looked for money. But instead of finding dollars, they found Yen. They used their Yen to buy Japanese bubble gum and blew huge bubbles and stood outside in the wind hoping that the wind would carry them home.
They liked Japan, but they missed their families.
One day, a helicopter landed in the field outside the factory where they worked. The boys stepped inside. The helicopter carried them to the top of a mountain. The boys wondered what to do.
The helicopter pilot told them that this was their new home.
The boys got out and looked around. There was nothing but snow and wind.
The boys had a few handfuls of bubble gum left, so they blew big bubbles and lifted their heads to the wind.
The wind picked them up and carried them high into the sky. It was cold and dark. They sailed through clouds and over jungles and oceans. They wondered if they’d ever get home.
They landed in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas, far from where they lived.
The walked to the road and waited for a taxi cab to come along. They offered the driver the rest of their Yen to take them to a town. He didn’t want the Yen but took them because he didn’t want two kids to be stuck in the middle of nowhere.
When they got to the town, they went straight to the roller rink. They hadn’t roller skated in a long time. At the roller rink, there was a television producer who asked them to star in a new show about friends who speak Japanese.
The show was a huge hit. The boy’s parents’ watched the show and came to pick them up in Hollywood. The boys bought one big house for their parents and grandparents and friends to live in together. The house had three swimming pools, a roller skating rink, and bubble gum machines in every room.
After a few years, the show was canceled, but by then the boys had saved up enough money to spend all of their time doing nice things for people who didn’t have enough to eat.
They bought another house in Japan and went there every once in a while to visit their old friends, make blenders, and practice their Japanese.
It’s so lucky that I found those two dollars that day, said Fred.
It’s lucky that someone invented bubble gum said Billy.
And there you have it. Although that story wasn’t really about hot air balloons, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have written if if I hadn’t been trying to write a story about hot air balloons. Which is a really important point: a prompt is a helpful thing, even if it takes you somewhere completely unexpected. In fact, maybe that’s the real point.
So…now it’s your turn to write a story about a hot air ballon. Or a story that’s not about a hot air balloon at all. In fact, we’d love to hear any story you have to tell us, whether or not it was inspired by hot air balloons. Just as long as it comes out of you.
Just add your story to the comments below. We can’t wait to read what you post!
Hello everyone! I hope you enjoyed learning about George Washington last week (I sure did) but now it’s time to move on.
This week’s Theme of the Week is Hot Air Balloons #bobbledyhotair !!! I LOVE hot air balloons! They are so cool! Or should I say HOT?!
photo by DarlArthurS
If you haven’t seen hot air balloons in real life before, then you probably don’t realize just how gigantic they are.
Holy cow!! That is enormous!!!
Hot air balloons are able to float because hot air is lighter than cold air. I know – that’s weird, because how much does air really weigh anyway? Have you ever lifted air?
(OMG I just tried to find out how much air weighs. If you’re interested in how a simple question can have a very complicated answer, check it out here!)
Well, the fact is that even though air doesn’t seem heavy to US, it does still weigh something. And hot air is lighter than cold air. SO – if you heat air, it goes up. We don’t really notice this, because we can’t see it happening. BUT – you might have noticed that when you roast marshmallows over a fire, the air ABOVE the fire gets hotter than the air to the sides of the fire. That’s because the hot air is floating UP (not sideways, or down).
So what a hot air balloon does is actually catch the hot air and keep it inside. Then, the hot air will make the balloon itself float up, because the hot air inside is lighter than the cooler air outside the balloon. Apparently, if you know anything about flying hot air balloons, the best days to fly are ones that are cool and clear, because it’s much easier to get the air inside the balloon hotter than the air outside if the air outside is cool. Got it?
Hot air balloons have big burners inside, just above the basket. They heat up the air to inflate the balloon, and then keep the air hot while the balloon is up in the air. The “pilot” of a hot air balloon turns the heater on if he wants the air to get hotter (and float higher) and turns it off if he wants the air to cool off (and sink lower).
Here’s a cool video showing how the burners work. You can see how hard it is to inflate a hot air balloon!
Now, most of us are familiar with these great big hot air balloons, but hot air balloons weren’t always the big giant ones. The very first ones were quite small. They were invented in China over 1,700 years ago by a warrior named Zhuge Liang. He made his out of a very light paper bag with an oil lamp attached to it, and when he sent it up in the air at night, it glowed. He was able to signal to other troops fighting with him – and it also confused his enemies, because they couldn’t figure out what it was.
If you’ve seen Tangled, it’s just like the sky lanterns that Rapunzel wanted to see:
(and if you HAVEN’T seen Tangled, you MUST! Go do it RIGHT NOW!!!)
There are actually festivals in China and Taiwan and Thailand where thousands of people come together and send their sky lanterns floating up into the sky, just like in Tangled. And it’s even more beautiful in real life.
Of course, sky lanterns are kind of dangerous because what comes up, must come down. Usually the fire has gone out by the time the sky lantern comes back to the ground, but there’s also the problem that most people don’t go looking for their lantern after it falls to put it in the trash. (If you want to learn more about how much trash we’re generating these days, you can look at our Garbage Theme of the Week!).
It wasn’t until about 200 years ago that people started making the giant balloons for people to ride in. Before they figured out what the best way to make hot air balloons, they had lots of different ideas of what might work:
And, because they weren’t sure if it was safe for people to travel by hot air balloon, the very first passengers on a hot air balloon were a sheep, a rooster and a duck. Yep! As part of this first flying experiment, the balloon designers wanted to test the effects of flying on animals that were already able to fly as well as an animal that would never be able to fly. They picked a sheep because apparently back then, they thought sheep were the most similar to humans. (In case you’re worried, the animals all survived the experiment without any problem.)
So that’s it! That’s all you need to know about hot air balloons!! If you learn anything more interesting, please add it in the comments below. And also answer this question: if you could take a hot air balloon ride, where would you go and who would you take with you?
Stay tuned on Monday for Matthew’s story about hot air balloons!!
okay, andd if you aren’t totally tired of hot air balloons by now, check out this craziness:
