Wednesday Explorers Club ~ Catch the Wind

It's the first day of spring, and some of us are dreaming of heading out on a breezy day for a bit of kite-flying. After all, March is a windy month.

But kites aren't the only way to enjoy the wind. We have a "wind garden" around the house - chimes hanging from branches. They create a symphony of sound all year round. Some are finely-tuned, crafted by chime-makers. Others are shells, bamboo, spoons, and other things we've hung to capture the wind.

Up at the airport they catch the wind in a huge sock. And outside the monastery they've got strands and strands of prayer flags that flap in the breeze.

Here are directions on how to make a kite from a plastic garbage bag.

When the Wind Blows

When the Wind Blows
by Stacy Clark; illus. by Brad Sneed
32 pages; ages 4-8
Holiday House, 2015

theme: nature, nonfiction, engineering

When the wind blows
   Porch doors sway
      Dune grass bends
         Sea waves spray

This is a wonderful book about harnessing the wind's energy - how it is transformed from a force of nature that spins turbines into electricity that powers our cities.

What I like about this book: The lyrical language. This is a nonfiction book, filled with wind turbine innards and magnetic forces and electrons. It is also written is lovely poetic language. I also love the way each page begins with "When the wind blows..." I also like the structure: we start at the beach, head offshore to wind turbines, then back onshore with electricity, and finally end up right back where we started: at the beach.

Beyond the Book: 
Make a Pinwheel. All you need is a square piece of paper, a pair of scissors, a thin dowel and a long pin (like a hat pin) or a long push-pin. Check out the directions here.

What's in the Wind? Maybe there are dandelion seeds or tiny moths... here's directions on how to find out.

Make a Wind Painting. Splot some tempera paint onto a paper plate. Then take it outside and let the wind blow the paint around.

Go on a Windy Walk. Grab your journal and head outside on a windy day. Jot down all the things that you see blowing in the wind: flags, leaves, branches swaying.

Make some Wind chimes out of recycled soup and tuna cans. Kid-friendly directions here.

Today is STEM Friday - head over to the STEM Friday blog to see what other bloggers are reviewing. It's also PPBF (perfect picture book Friday) over at  Susanna Leonard Hill's site. She keeps an ever-growing list of Perfect Picture Books.  Review copy provided by publisher.
 

Engineering Nature's Designs

The other day I was out taking photos of leaves and I stopped to listen to the world around me. It’s pretty quiet on my hill, but there was a lot of rustling in the leaves – a breeze so subtle that I couldn’t feel it had the big toothed aspen leaves chattering like the ladies down at Rosie’s Café (an imaginary place that doesn’t exist in my town but should). I got to wondering how cool it would be if we could harness all the energy generated by the leaves flipping back and forth on their stems.

Some engineers had a similar idea. They were looking at problems with harvesting wind power in urban areas, where wind speeds are lower than needed for large turbines and where you wouldn’t want huge turbines anyway. One mechanical engineer experimented with an aerofoil that fluttered like a fish tail, generating small amounts of current each time it moved. Another team proposed a tree of flapping “leaves”.

Scientists at UC Davis are growing tiny “trees” of silver to collect solar energy. But you don’t have to be an engineer in a university lab to come up with a new idea. Thirteen-year old Aidan Dwyer devised a vertical array of solar cells to resemble the leaves that collect the sun’s energy. Because, as he pointed out, those natural “solar panels” aren’t all flat, like roof panels. In fact, they’re arranged around the trunk of a tree in a specific pattern: the Fibonacci sequence.

Aidan's project won the 2011 Young Naturalist award from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Even though he made some rather serious errors in original calculations, the idea has merit. He's conducting a new set of experiments to see if he gets similar results (with corrected calculations).

Velcro was another nature-inspired idea that came from close observation of how burdocks clung to sweaters. What ideas does nature inspire in you? For more Friday science inspiration, head over to  STEM Friday. 

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