Observing Wind!

After waiting several days, we were finally able to get out and make some observations about the wind today!  We wanted the children to experience the wind and to try to observe the direction of the wind.  We held salt in our hands to see if it would blow in the wind, felt wind in our hair and used our homemade weathervane.  We used all of these things to try to help us to determine the direction of the wind.  We also introduced the four cardinal directions (North, South, East and West) while trying to determine wind direction.  We placed our weathervanes in the center of the sidewalk and had 4 of our friends hold the direction signs in the appropriate places.  We determined that the wind seemed to be blowing east, but our weathervanes were pointing west!  We had many more questions that we will continue to explore over the next few weeks.  Below is a video of our weathervane in action and some other shots from our wind photographers Charlie S, Sevana and Zach.

 

 

 

Air All Around Us!

Today the students investigated some of the properties of air.  They engaged in a demonstration of how air fills an "empty" space in bags and even inside objects such as sponges, clay pot pieces and rocks.  We started by dropping different objects into a bucket of water to observe what would happen.  We noticed that tiny bubbles began to escape from several of the items and move towards the surface of the water.  The kids loved watching this happen.  We talked about where they thought the bubbles might be coming from.  We then experimented with air inside of plastic bags.  Below are some pictures of our air explorations taken by our photographers Ally S., Carter and Michael J.