Pleasant Valley Intermediate students are shooting for the sky this week, and it's all in the name of education.

Over the course of six days, PVI science teacher Malcolm McKinsey will help a few hundred kids send their spacecrafts to the stars - or as far as their engines can take them, at least.McKinsey has been building and launching model rockets as part of the sixth-grade curriculum for about five years."I began with just a few students, then expanded until I have all downstairs students - 204 eligible to build and launch - participating. Before that, I twice did it as an extracurricular activity with my fifth-grade classes," he said.The activity helps the science students to comprehend elements of Newton's laws of motion, energy, gravitation and chemical reactions. McKinsey said that the laws of motion are most immediately connected to the project."It's like a summary of all the lessons that we've done in science," sixth-grader William Bruckman, 12, said. "Like Newton's laws of motion, the third law says that for every action force, there is an equal and opposite reaction force."While McKinsey could simply instruct the students on these principles while indoors, he believes that the hands-on, outdoor project has more of an impact."Today's various curricula mostly involve paperwork, reading and writing. This is a hands-on approach that places real-world responsibility with the children to follow directions, use fine-motor skills, build something and see it work."Combining it with classroom theory makes the science far more meaningful. For every lesson, I have students do student experiments. So to finish the year in style, we do the ultimate hands-on project, building and launching real model rockets."Of course, the hands-on aspect did make the project a bit of a challenge, but it was nothing the students couldn't overcome."Actually building it was hard," sixth-grader Antonella Rinaldo, 12, said."I messed up on my first one, and it got melted, so I had to build a new one. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun when we got to do the launch."This year, the rockets were paid by a grant McKinsey received from the Pleasant Valley Education Foundation. To participate in the rocket building and launching, students could not miss any classwork or tests related to Newton's laws of motion, and they had to pass the National Association of Rocketry Model Rocket Safety quiz with a 100 percent grade."The National Association of Rocketry Model Rocket Safety Code ensured that all students behaved safely on the launch site. It was, as I said, a privilege for them, not a given. They worked hard to earn it," McKinsey said.Just about every rocket was able to take off successfully, although a few had trouble deploying their parachutes. Nevertheless, most students were able to precisely position their launch to ensure the rocket would land somewhere close near the baseball diamond."I think they're going well. We're having a lot of great success, going straight up and straight down," McKinsey said. "This is the fourth day of six days of launches, and I'm looking forward to a successful end of the year for the last two days."By all accounts, the students had a great time with the launches, and they were able to take in a lot more scientific knowledge because of it."It made me work a lot harder, knowing that it all came back to something like this," Rinaldo said.