Introduction
In the first investigations of Climate and Weather, your students developed
a working concept of air—a gas material that surrounds the Earth,
fills space and exerts pressure on its surroundings. In Weather 3, you
will help them to develop a concept of moving air or wind. Based on observations
of their surroundings and the behavior of a simple instrument they make
themselves, your students will learn to report two properties of moving
air; wind speed and direction. Just as they did for temperature, they
can record these observations on their Daily Weather Report.
Young children can easily infer the movement of air by observing its
everyday effects on trees, smoke, flags and the ruffling of their hair
or a cool breeze on their faces. They will have been familiar with wind
from their earliest memories, but they may not necessarily associate this
directly with moving air. The movement of large air masses across landscapes
and oceans is invisible, but even if it were observable it covers too
large an area for young children to actually see and understand.
The idea that air reaches us from different directions at different times
may also be new to young children. While they know wind occurs from time
to time, they may not notice the different wind directions. It is also
unlikely that they will associate different wind speeds and directions
with particular weather patterns. Do storms always come from the same
direction? Do high winds mean the weather is going to change? Do winds
bring hot weather or cold weather, or both? These are some of the questions
that young children may have never asked themselves because their focus
in on how the wind is acting on them at a given moment, not over long
periods of hours or days.
By the end of this section, your students should be able to read much
more into the air movements they experience than they do at the start
of these investigations.
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