‘Reach for the Sky’ from the comfort of your living room

With the schools closing ahead of schedule, here's an Easter treat from the Manchester Airport Community Relations Team - a fun and engaging puzzle book, for you to download, that will help budding young aviation fans 'reach for the sky'.        The team's education outreach programme worked with nearly 14,000 pupils across Greater Manchester and Cheshire in 2019, helping them build key skills and increasing their awareness of the range of careers that is available to them. Its projects include an annual Dragons' Den competition, Christmas card workshops and distributing hundreds of free books for World Book Day. In addition, they host masterclasses with schools and offer a host of work experience opportunities. You can find out more about the team's work here.

 Pupils from Stockport to Sunderland enjoy Manchester Airport's 80th birthday book

Now, with kids stuck at home for the foreseeable future, the team has turned its attentions to helping parents keep youngsters' minds active during these uncertain times.

The 'Reach for the Sky' storybook that the team wrote and shared with schools for free in 2018, to mark the airport’s 80th birthday, is the inspiration for a new activity book filled with brainteasers, puzzles and challenges. The activities, which include a mix of literacy, maths and artistic exercises, have been crafted to suit primary school children of all ages. The perfect pack to help parents with homeschooling.

The tasks all have a theme of aviation and travel, from understanding the world's different time zones to creating fact files on countries across the globe and thinking about the skills needed for lots of different kinds of jobs. Kids will also have the chance to write a sequel to the original storybook, deciding where Captain Adam will fly to next.

Andrew Cowan, Chief Executive Officer at Manchester Airport, said: "These are undoubtedly very difficult times for children and their parents in our region and across the country, so we wanted to play our part in helping them through it, however we could.

"Our Community Relations team does some fantastic work in reaching out to schools and giving young minds an insight into the world of aviation and travel. We didn't see why the coronavirus pandemic should get in the way of that, so have found a way to bring that to youngsters' living rooms whilst schools are closed.

"The activity book builds on the great work done by our Community Relations team in 2018 in creating a storybook to mark our 80th birthday. We're sure kids will enjoy catching up with Captain Adam again and joining him on his travels around the world, learning as they go."

As well as learning about Captain Adam in the airport’s first book, the pack encourages children to draft and share their copy of what they think the sequel should be. Mums and dads are invited to tweet us @manairport with their little ones' adventure stories and we'll share some of our favourites!

Recommended for you...