Gilberto and the Wind

Monday morning, 8:30 am, team determination congregated in Nebraska parking lot ready to go. This session was the first implementation of Gilberto and the Wind, and I was pretty excited to get do the science center during center time. We all piled into the van, making sure not to spill our ever so valuable coffee, and headed down to Sunshine Early Learning Center in SE.  After successful reading and circle time, I headed to my center, eager to begin the science center. This center was focused on the wind, and what objects the wind is able to move. In order to create this wind, we had a hair dryer, ready for action. A few students lingered over to my table, and honestly were a bit confused as to why there was no paint in the art center. After explaining what awesome activities we were going to do, a grin grew on the students’ faces, and we began our activity. There were four objects in our experiment; a feather, cork, clothespin and balloon. Each student was able to hold the object and guess if the wind would move it across the table. Key vocabulary such as heavy, light, and dense were added to the conversation, as students created a hypothesis. The first object, a bright red feather, sat still on the table before I started the wind. The moments before I turned the hairdryer to ‘low’ were almost in slow motion, full of excitement and tension. When I finally pushed the switch, the feather went flying, as each student screamed with excitement. Each and every other student and Jumpstart corps member turned towards science, curious and envious of our experiment. This continued for the rest of center time, with students eager to explore the effects of wind to regular household objects. Although I was curious how this center  was going to work, I was extremely pleased with how it turned out. The excitement from this center was contagious in the rest of session. Even though science is not a regular center, I hope it will come up in later sessions!

~Blaire Cohen
Corps member
Team Determination