Science for Preschoolers: What Does Wind Do?

Description: Easy preschool science experiments that help your child understand how wind makes things move.

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Does your preschooler know what wind is? You can explain that air is all around us, and we can feel it move on a windy day.

Before you complete the following preschool science experiments, you may want to introduce the topic by reading some books about wind to your child. One good book about wind is The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins. Another is Gilberto and the Wind by Marie Hall Ets.

Here are two preschool science experiments to help your child observe what wind does and discover how wind makes things move.

Make a Windy Day

In this experiment, you will help your child explore how air moves and observe how wind affects a variety of objects.

What You Need:

• Fan
• Various small objects of different weights and sizes, such as paper, feather, string, ribbon, a small ball

What You Do:

Set up the fan and place the objects in a tray or box beside you.

Ask your child to think about what wind does to objects outside. Has he seen a ball blow out of someone’s yard, or a hat blow off someone’s head? That was wind.

Explain that you are going to hold some objects in front of the fan. Together you will watch to see which objects are easily moved by wind, and which aren’t.

Pick up one object at a time, or let your preschooler choose the objects, and ask your child if he thinks the wind will make it move.

Then turn on the fan, and find out if your child’s guess was correct. You may want to try different fan speeds and see if that changes the results.

Continue until you run out of items, or until your child loses interest in the experiment.

What You Learned:

Wind makes things move.

Wind affects different objects in different ways.

Make a Windy Picture

In this next activity, your child can pretend to be the wind and explore how wind makes clouds move across the sky.

What You Need:

• Thin white paint
• Blue paper

What You Do:

Place a small amount of white paint on the blue paper. Tell your preschooler the white paint is a white cloud in the blue sky.

Have your child blow gently on the paint, like a breeze. Together, watch how the paint moves across the paper. Look for pictures in the in the clouds your child makes.

What You Learned:

Wind makes the clouds move across the sky.

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