August in Brisbane usually means windy weather. Windy weather often brings out some strange behaviours in children – they may get grumpy, tired or fidgety. Teachers will often tell you that during windy weather the children in their classes may become very restless. Parents may see it too.
Recently during some very windy weather, my children and our neighbours did some great activities and experimenting outside. All activities involved making, thinking and some great learning. Above all, it kept them outside and busy, which is a great thing to do in windy weather. I thought I would share with you the 2 activities they did and one great activity I used to do with my class when it was too windy and the children were too restless.
3 Great Windy weather activities:
1. Make kites out of different sized plastic shopping bags.
- Using the shopping bags from grocery stores, the children tied the handles together using some wool, wound wool onto a stick, added tails and watched as the kites caught the wind and flew up into the sky.
- There was lots of talk about how we could make them go higher, what happens when the wind direction changes, did we need longer or shorter wool. Lots of great science discussion and lots of fun was had.
2. Based on the idea of parasailing, the children tried to determine what they could get to take off from behind a bike.
- The children tied some rope to their bikes and then attached different objects to the rope using a plastic bag as the parachute.
- Many items didn’t take off and this allowed for lots of discussions about why it didn’t and what we needed to change. This prompted lots of scientific discussion. They even tried to tie themselves to the rope and pull from behind the bike (lol).
- Regardless of what happened they all had a great time and lots of laughs.
3. Lastly, one of the activities my class loved to do on a windy day was take their wind flyers out to the oval and take them for a run.
- I have attached a PDF copy of the wind flyer and instructions on how to make
- Once you have made take outside on a windy day and throw into the wind and watch it spin.
- You can also have races with other wind flyers
- As a teacher I found this gave the kids some exercise and settled them down quite a bit.
Click here for the PDF copy of the Wind Flyer.
I hope you enjoy these activities on a windy day and it helps settle those restless children.
Let me know of any other fun wind activities that you have done with your children.
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