FROM HOME & CLASSROOM MAGAZINE: What About The Wind?
What About The Wind?
by Colleen Sterling
Home and Classroom
Volume 6 - Babies
The wind can be difficult concept to understand. Wind is moving air and air is what we breathe. You can’t see wind, except for what it moves like leaves, branches or plastic bags. You feel wind on your skin and blowing through your hair. Sometimes you can hear the wind rustling through leaves or whistling through cracks in your home.
The first step is to find out what your child understands about wind and get them thinking about how it works. Here are two fiction books about wind that you can use to introduce the topic of wind with your child. Gilberto and the Wind by Marie Hall Ets (1963). A little boy hears the wind whispering at the door and takes this as an invitation to play. His inability to control the wind is problematic. Like a Windy Day by Frank and Devin Asch (2002). A little girl thinks it would be fun to imitate the wind’s actions—snapping wet sheets, stealing hats, and shaking dew from a spider’s web. Text is minimal with good descriptive words.
After reading, make a list with your child and talk about what they see the wind moving. Your child may mention things like clouds, sailboats, grass, kites from the books. Also think about the flag outside the library and items they come across in their own neighborhood. Are there ways they can make their own wind? They might think about blowing with their mouths, making a paper fan, or using an electric fan. Ask them to think about how wind works and encourage their curiosity.
Do you need to brush up on the science behind wind? Here are two non-fiction children’s books that you can find as read-a-louds on YouTube or the book at your local library to help you and your child learn about wind. Feel the Wind by Arthur Dorros (1989). This has a lot of information about why wind moves and introduces different types of weather and how wind is used as power. I would recommend using this book as background knowledge for the adult and share the appropriate sections that your child is interested in. Wind by Erik Edison (2021) is a briefer and easier to read non-fiction book on wind for our younger children.
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Hot Air, Cold Air Experiment: You will need a plastic bottle without the cap, a balloon, and two containers: one filled with hot tap water (do not boil the water) and second container filled with cold water and ice cubes. Remember to talk to your children about being safe around the hot water. If you are doing this experiment in a classroom, please do it with small groups, so children can be closely supervised.
Adult: blow up the balloon to stretch it out (a few times) and make it more flexible then let the air out.
Place the balloon over the mouth of the empty plastic bottle, the bigger the bottle the longer it will take to blow up the balloon.
Hold the bottle in the center of the container filled with hot water. Wait a few minutes and notice the balloon start to inflate and expand.
Remove the bottle from the hot water and hold it in the container with cold water and ice. Wait a few moments and notice that the balloon start to deflate and contract.
During the experiment ask the children to describe the differences they are seeing in the water temperature and the effect it is having on the balloon. Some questions to ask your child:
What do you think the hot water is doing to the air in the plastic bottle?
What do you think the cold water is doing to the air in the plastic bottle?
Why do you think the warm water is expanding the balloon and the cold water isn’t?
If you want to include some math and technology skills, the children can help record the temperature of the containers of water with a food thermometer.
The explanation: Hot air is lighter than cold air so as the air in the plastic bottle heats up the air rises and expands the balloon. As the air cools in the container filled with ice water the balloon deflates as the air falls to the bottom of the plastic bottle. Wind is created when the earth’s warm air rises and the cool air moves in to take its place. Learning about wind can lead to more experiments and learning about weather, power, erosion or sailboats.