Nursery World - Outdoors: STEM – breath of fresh air

Air is not only essential for life but is also a fantastic STEM resource in its own right, and Julie Mountain and Felicity Robinson’s ideas will blow your mind

Quick wins – target games

Throwing objects might be a contentious activity, but it is an important one.

Children like to throw things, and in order to write successfully, they need to build up the muscle groups in their upper back, shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers – and practising controlled flinging is one way of doing this.

As children grow older, the ability to hit a target accurately (basketball hoop, archery target, etc.) will become increasingly valued. Start by experimenting with simple home-made targets such as a chalk mark on the floor or on a wall, or a bucket suspended from a rope.

Juliet Robertson of Creative Star Learning has a great maths resource that is also excellent for target practice – it’s a tarpaulin with different sized shapes cut out of it; she marks the boundary of each shape with duct tape to make it stand out more.

Make one of these, suspend it from two trees or a piece of play equipment and encourage children to aim various objects through the holes – use balls, but also more tricky, less aerodynamic resources such as a rugby ball, a coconut, an empty bottle. Are some objects easier to throw through the air? Why? Why can’t you throw a feather at a target? Which objects move fastest? Are heavier objects easier to target, or lighter ones?

Continuous provision – something in the air

Many of the loose-parts resources you already have outdoors will lend themselves well to playing with air. Think about the qualities of air and wind to explore prompts using commonly found equipment. It’s important to reinforce safety rules such as not aiming objects at people, animals or windows.

Bubbles – Bubble Brothers’ mix is strong, makes five litres and will make huge bubbles as well as millions of tiny ones. To make miniature bubbles, cut short lengths of corrugated cardboard and dip the ‘open’ end into the bubbles, then blow through the other end. I learned this on a visit to a Japanese kindergarten, and introduced them to the ‘two sticks and two lengths of string’ technique to make enormous bubbles.
Straws are great for making wind-blown artworks: place blobs of paint onto a large piece of paper or even the ground and blow through the straws – how easy is it to control the paint? On a windy day, weigh down the corners of a large piece of paper and blob paint onto it – will the wind blow the paint all over the paper?
Make paper aeroplanes, experimenting with shape and size of wings. If you can, purchase a few foam or plastic planes to compare your home-made ones against. Can children target their planes to land on a chalked-out ‘airstrip’? Look at video clips of planes’ flaps and engines – the principles of air pressure will be a bit too complex for young children, but it’s worth introducing the idea of a take-off speed to get airborne, just like when they fling their paper plane into the air.
Long, strong feathers – collect them when you see them. Pheasant and seagull feathers (or peacock, if you’re really lucky) are wonderful for playing in the breeze, but avoid the multicoloured craft feathers unless you fancy still picking them out of the hedge this time next year.
Water trough: screw the tops on a few bottles and ask children to try to submerge them. Why won’t they sink? Collect objects from around the garden and see if they will sink or float.

In the moment – when the wind blows

On a windy day, show children a diagram of the Beaufort wind scale.

Talk about gales and storms children can remember. Can they recall any of the names? What do they remember about the wind?
Grab a few strips of tissue paper and lightweight fabric and hold them up into the air to observe which way the wind is blowing. Talk about the local landmarks or garden features the wind is blowing from and to, and use a compass (or the app on a tablet) to agree which direction it’s blowing in. Use wind terminology such as ‘northerly’ (i.e. from the north). Visit different parts of the garden to establish whether some places are windier than others.
Some winds are so prevalent and famous, they get their own names, such as the Berg, which blows off the west and southern coasts of Africa, the Chinook in mountainous areas of North America, the Mistral in southern France and the north African Scirocco. What name would the children give the wind that blows through your setting?
Aromas are carried in the air, too. After a prolonged period of hot, dry weather, a unique smell called petrichor is generated by rain falling on bacteria in the soil. Don’t miss the opportunity to sniff it. Another distinctive smell in the air is ozone, which can often be sniffed before a thunderstorm or on a clear, cool evening – it’s a sweet, metallic smell and also worth a trip outdoors to sniff.

Enhancement – Air / Windy Day box

Here are some ideas for contents to collect for an ‘air’ set:

Spherical objects of varying sizes and weights, for throwing – marbles, a golf ball, soft squeezy balls…
Shuttlecocks – throw them plenty of times before introducing a racquet.
Silky scarves (donated or bought at charity shops), some tied onto the end of a stick for testing wind resistance.
Small, simple-to-use kites made of ripstop nylon.
A windsock banner on a long, flexible telescopic pole – the end can be stuck into soil and the banner changed for other flags.
A plastic ‘cup’-style anemometer to measure wind speed.
Bicycle pump and hand air pump; bicycle inner tubes; inflatable dice.
Bicycle horn, recorders, pipes, whistles.
Parachute, plus small-world ‘soldiers’ on parachutes.

Planning ahead

We may not be able to see air, but we can prove it’s there with several enjoyable experiments:

Bottle water rockets – you’ll need empty 2l drinks bottles, corks and a craft knife, a football pump needle, water and foot pump or a two-hand vertical pump. You also need a ‘launch pad’ – I tend to use a gardening fork with a D-shaped handle, angled into the ground. 1/3 fill the bottle with water; trim the cork so it fits snugly into the neck of the bottle; pierce a hole through the cork with a thick sewing needle or thin skewer and push the inflating needle through it, with the connector outside the bottle. Attach the air pump to the connector and prop up the bottle, neck pointing towards the ground. Pump like crazy and wait for the rocket to launch.

Make small-world parachutists – use plastic or paper bags, or a square of fabric, for the parachute; attach strings to the corners and tie or tape them to your small-world figures. Drop them from various heights and observe how the wind speed and direction affects the fall of the parachutes.

Demonstrate that hot air rises – you’ll need a few tealight candles, matches and a circle of paper cut into a spiral with a thread pulled through the centre. Hold the spiral by the thread, above the burning tealight, and watch as the warm air makes the spiral spin. Add more lit tealights – what happens? Fire needs air to sustain itself; place a glass jar over the tealights and watch what happens.

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