Wind Power, what an interesting topic of conversation!!
With our Living Green project still going strong, we started to explore and question the concept of WIND POWER!
what is it?
how does it work?
why does it work?
where does it happen?
These questions were all blowing around us and we started exploring with some brainstorming:
With lots of excitement and questioning, we started our journey into the world of WIND POWER by first discovering what it actually does. The children were excited to learn that energy from the wind is commonly used to produce electricity, learning all about wind turbines and understanding that wind turbines are often placed in large open areas instead of in the cities where lots of buildings can block the flow of wind.
With the excitement of our Energy Diet Challenge underway, the children were excited to complete our wind power challenge: creating an anemometer. An anem-what-a-ter?! EXACTLY!!!
An anemometer is a device used to measure wind speed. With this device, we were excited to determine where the best place on our school yard for a wind turbine would be and to figure this out, we needed our own anemometers. So what did we do!? We created them of course!!!!
Using 4 paper cups each, 2 straws, 1 pencil, 1 pin and some tape, we were able to create our very own wind speed measurement devices! With our own flare of creative details of course 🙂
The children loved building their anemometers and we were thrilled to have chosen a windy enough day to test them out!
The EXPERIMENT
To complete our experiment, we decided to take samples of wind from four areas in our school yard: the playground, the baseball diamond, the field and by the school. The document below is attached for your use!
Here are some photos of the children enjoying nature, wind and experimenting as scientists!
Once we were finished our experiment, we went back to our classrooms to come to a conclusion!
After sharing our results, the majority of the classroom agreed that the BEST place to put a wind turbine at our school would be in the middle of the field. The majority of longest spins from our anemometers occurred in this location!
Although some of our anemometers were VERY successful, some were only successful some of the time and others were not successful at all. Being scientists, we all know that things can happen along the way and errors can occur during our experiments and that’s OKAY!!! This will only make us better scientists for our next big project 🙂
…until then….
~ Miss Kim
