Tom Hall setting up our weather station.

These articles have been written by students during the project.

Weather station adjustments and fine tuning.

Our class is starting to make a windmill quilt. It was made from different size triangles. We had to create a quilt block to look like a windmill.

Making the shapes fit together was hard. We helped each other. Next we will place each block side by side to make a quilt.

We are responsible for updating the data from our classroom weather station. We are learning new weather words each day.

Kat Hill came to talk with us about electricity. It is not free. We must not waste this resource.

Our classroom is a Watt Watcher room. We make sure that the lights are turned off when we leave our space.

Our classroom did a inquiry lesson on the wind. We wonder what things would be caught on a jelly string. It surprised us

that the wind blew moss, dirt and leaves on the string. We were amazed that a small bug flew into the string and was trapped.

We learned that wind has the power to move even heavy things.

Pinwheels are fun to make but they don't always work. We had to redesign our project. The goal was to make sure the pinwheel spun freely in

the wind without rubbing against the pencil. We learned that the blades must be at a certain angle in order to catch the wind.

On September 22 we took our pinwheels and place them in the ground for International Peace Day.

Please check out their site http://www.pinwheelsforpeace.com/ for more information on this project.

We know that air is always pushing on us. We did a science lab that showed us that air pressure will hold water in a cup.

Ryan and Regan from room 14-5th grade. Tell us about the Anemometer’s they made.

Ryan explained, “Anemometer is a type of machine that measures wind speed.”

Regan described the materials they had, “We had a wooden plank, and we could use 4 cups, 2 straws, and 1 pin,

1 pencil, and some clay .It was practically our own design.

If we needed help we could look in our science books. My partner and I decided to puta piece of clay on the plank,

then we poked a pencil through the clay, and took a straw and poked a pin through the middle of it,and then the rest

of the pin went through the eraser so it was able to spin. Then we put one cup on the ends of the straw, we stuck the cups together by clay.

It’s not quite finished, and we have to try them out before we can finish them.”

Ryan exclaims, “I had the same materials as Regan and the rest of the class. The first thing my partner and

I did was took the plank of wood,and wrote our names in the corner. Next we took the point of the pencil

into the ball of clay. Then we cut one straw in half, and grabbed the pin and stuck it in the middle of one of the halves.

Next we put clay on both sides of the straws, and we took two cups, one of them facing forward, and the

other facing the opposite direction. Then we put tape over both the cups. We then colored the plank.

Now we get to try it outside today at 1:40. What I think is going to happen is, I think because the straw is loose,

that it will go twenty times around in fifty seconds, and then it will probably go even faster in the next fifty seconds

from the wind speed Mrs.Foelkl told us it would be today.

Salem Electric presented information on electrical safety. As a second grade group we learned to be safe around electricity.

Don’t touch transformers because they can explode. Never sit on the green box or throw anything at a transformer. Cade and Zach

Don’t get out of the car if there is a power line on or next to your car. You could get shocked or electrocuted. Evie

If you see people in a car and a power line is touching that car, do not open the car door or try to get them out of the car.

The electricity will travel through your body and you’ll get hurt. Emma

Birds and squirrels are okay to run on power lines, but they cannot touch a pole or they will get shocked. Jackson

Watch out when climbing a tree. Always look up and around you for power lines. Hannah

Never hang papers or flyers to the brown power poles. The workers have a hard time climbing the poles with nails and paper. Jalyssa

Tell a parent if they go on the roof to fix something always look for power lines. Mikayla

Don’t dig under the ground without someone coming to tell you if there is a power line in that location. Lizzy

Weather indicators using streamers and Kestrel pocket weather meters

Science is art. Our job was to make statues that had at least four pieces that moved in the wind. We had lots of things to choose from.

From those things we were to build a wind structure. We used our imagination as we added items to our statues.

Some of the items were tape, yarn, sticks, and other fun building materials. Engineering is hard work. It takes a lot of thought to get your idea to work.

Wind Vanes

The purpose of this project was to learn to tell what direction thewind was coming from. After we researched the purpose of weather vanes we drew our

design in our science notebook. The only materials we had to build our wind vanes were a cup, a straw, a pencil, a pin and two index cards.

We followed our first design that we drew in our notebooks. When the design did not work we redesigned. We learned that it was important to

have the directional part of the vane have a small side and a larger side.

We just finished our bases for our wind turbine. It was really fun. We did it with our second grade buddies. What we did was, we took the base of it,

and practiced Indian art and symbols to go around the base. Each person had to practice at least 5 symbols. When we were done practicing,

we drew them in pencil, and each symbol had to be at least one inch wide. After that, we colored them in with black marker, and practiced our

bubble letters for North, East, South, and West. Now we are working on our turbine. It was somewhat irritating at first because my group

was a bit behind, but it got more fun towards the end. We caught up pretty quickly. It’s fun working with our buddies. I would definitely do it again.

Our research on how electricity is generated by wind turbines took us to West Salem High, Mr. Lampert's classroom to learn from our high school mentors.

Emma and Clayton from room 11 explain together, “We went to Mr. Lampert’s class up at the High School. When we were there, we did labs learning about magnets.

And in the labs we found where there was a magnetic field. We had magnets and a compass, and move it around on the table, and because there was different magnets

in different places, it would make the arrows move around more than once. After that lab, we watched Mr.Lampert do an experiment.He had a metal ring that had a coil

wire, and then he would plug it in and it would make a magnet and the ring would pop off to the ceiling. It was really cool. Then there was this little wire that had plastic

square blocks holding it up, and Mr. Lampert put the nail in, and plugged it in, and then the nail shot out of it! One of the High schoolers held onto a metal ring and it had

energy moving through it. He would hold it, and the other guy would get on his hands and knees, and the guy that had the ring touched the one on his hands and knees

and he got shocked! Then they had a little magnet plugged into a battery. A high schooler held onto one end, and 6 second graders held onto the other end to try and

pull it apart, but they couldn’t! It was too strong!

Then a high schooler started talking to us about the wind turbines. He taught us how fast the blades go around, and how fast the wind has to be blowing

for the blades to go. Then he explained that the wind turbine doesn’t spin much here. Then we got to go see the wind turbine.

It was 40 feet tall!!! Each blade is 10 feet long! It wasn’t moving when we went out there, so we decided to blow, but we couldn’t get it to move.

Then we tried to run around the wind turbine to make it move, but it didn’t work.

We went to learn about magnets and to learn about how wind turbines work. We had a lot of fun going.

I would like to go again soon.”

Turbine Tower Design Process

Emily, Kimber, and Wyatt from room 14 explain together, “First we had to put symbols on the gray bases, then we had to put north, south, east, and west on them.

We made our design phases for the wind turbine. After we were done with all of our designs, we had to start building the wind turbines. We used PVC pipes, T joints,

one 2” 10’ PVC pipe, 2 one inch 10’ PVC pipes, a Genacon generator, one zip tie, duct tape, 4 wood screws, 4 washers, and 1 nut and bolt. To begin building them,

we first put 3 caps down, and the wood screws. We had to use connectors on the pipes. Then we put the T joints on the top of the pipes so we could we could connect the

aluminum rod. We put bearings on the aluminum rod before putting it on the T joins so that it doesn’t move around. Then put the generator in the pipe by using duct tape,

or a zip tie. We then put the screw through the aluminum rod. Then we put smaller pieces of the PVC pipe to keep it steady. We would test it out after finishing making sure the pipe

would stay in the generator. We are doing this project because we were studying wind turbines and how they work. We thought we could do this project because it would

help us learn exact details of it. Now that we have finished, we are going to build our blades and attach them. Then we will test them out by taking them outside and see if they work!

We drew a turbine design and placed our design on a mosaic background.

Off to Evergreen Museum

We walked out of the school and saw two fancy buses. The bus was radical because there were giant windows,and it was not like the school bus. We arrived at the Evergreen Museum and saw huge buildings with lots of airplanes around it.

We started our tour at the I-Max Theater. We saw Space Station in 3-D. With a 3-D movie it felt like things were really coming towards you. When they showed the rocket up close, they told us that you should not stand near it or you could get disintegrated. There were tiny rocks that came towards us and it seemed like the glass was breaking right in front of us.

In the space museum we saw a Titan launch. The high school kids were the ground crew. They were the ones that made the launch happen. We felt scared because the room was shaking. There was a big missile behind us and we thought it would take off.

Then we went to make gliders. We learned about the shape of gliders and how they would fly. Each of us made a glider. We flew them in a contest to see how far they would fly.

In the flight museum we saw many airplanes. We looked at blade designs. We learned that all blades had to be the same shape and size. When the blades are the same size they are balanced. We went into the Spruce Goose. It the biggest wooden plane and it has the largest wing span of any plane in the world. The front opens up and carries 740 troupes. It is made from birch wood. It was planned that two people sit in the wings behind the motors with fire extinguishers in case there was a fire. The museum only paid a dollar for the plane.

This trip was important because when we build our own blades on our wind turbines it will help us design them to spin correctly. We were able to get more ideas about designing our blades. The trip helped us learn about the forces of flight. The forces are lift, drag, thrust and gravity. The trip to the Evergreen Museum gave us lots of ideas.

Designing the Blades

It was finally time to build our blades. Matt created his blade design by looking at airplane blades at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. Their group decided to make their blades out of balsa wood because it is light enough and sturdy. We got the number of blades idea from the high school kids. They told us the number three was best because it’s perfect to generate electricity, more than three blades increases the drag.

The group had Matt’s father help build the design because they had to use special equipment. On the first trial run the blade design had too much drag and it would not spin the generator. We had to redesign the blades. We cut down the blade in size, taking off the tips. We think that it is not curved enough. We think it will work when we test it again because it will spin faster generating more electricity.

Jacob’s group based their wind turbine design from books and from the internet. They based the size of the blades on the size of others blades they had seen before. Their blades are 14 inches in length. To catch more air we tried to put a curve on the blade. We chose our materials through experimentation, plexiglass and corrugated plastic. The blade shape looks like palm leaf. We chose that design because of the large scale models. We changed our blade shape to be more creative. We changed the end of blade to make it smaller. We think it will work because of the materials we used. If it does not work we will continue to redesign. It’s okay if it doesn’t work, it’s what we learned in the end.

Oregon Green School Presentation (coming soon)

Green School Summit

The educational sessions we participated in taught us how to help the earth instead of destroying it. Learning about sustainability means reusing and protecting resources so we have those resources for future generations. We learned that we should buy local produce and other products instead of buying from a large chain store that brings in products from far away. We also made paper out of recycled products and learned to conserve water. Taking old broken crayons and making new brightly colored crayons is a great way to reuse what we already own. Recycling and reusing items will keep our planet green. If everyone in the world picked up one piece of trash everyday, think of what a difference it would make towards keeping our environment clean. We were also able to present our turbines to all the other Green Schools at the summit.

Blade Adjustments

By Mikayla and Malia

It was time for our group to make adjustments to the blades on our turbine. We needed to duct tape the rod to the generator so it would rotate making electricity. Then we tested our blades with a fan. At first we had to touch a blade to get it to move. We noticed that one of the blades had to start at the top. We thought it was because the blade would catch the wind from the top position first. We tested our hypothesis and found out it was correct, a blade needed to start at the top. We had to move the blades. The pitch was not correct. We had to move it as much as 50 degrees. When we changed the pitch of the blades it actually spun the hub. It started out slowly but then got faster. We think it started to go faster because we increased the amount of wind.

Another group made cuts in the blades. They turned the cut side of the blades about a 45 degree angle. The turning of the blades made the rotation of hub move quicker. They stopped at the 45 degree angle because it was going at the quickest speed possible without touching the blades.

We learned that designing blades you must check gears, hubs and the blades. If you just build it and not test it a turbine would not work properly and you would not have the results you wanted.

Community Building: Final Touches

Community Building: Adding LED Lights

Final Testing Prior to Presentations

Rod Hill Comes to Chapman Hill

Rod Hill from Channel 2 KATU news came to our class and taught us about the weather. He taught us about air pressure and the water cycle. He taught us that if he were to stand on a chair there would be less air pressure on his head. If he was on the ground, then he would have more air pressure on his head. He told us about all the different types of clouds. Oregon has the stratus cloud, which means it's a flat, straight cloud that never ends. It just rains, we often call it a rain cloud. When it hails the Texas cloud it is above the stratus cloud, so we can't see it, all we can see is the rain cloud. A Texas cloud is a big cloud that has hail the size of a softball in it. When it hails on top of the stratus cloud, the stratus cloud then creates the hail to be the size of a softball. Before learning all of this awesome information, our class had to present our wind turbines to Mr. Hill. We had to explain how we made them, and what they will do to help save the earth. While we were presenting, Mr.Hill filmed us and later that evening we were on the news! We loved having Mr.Hill come, it was very informal, and we wish for him to come again. We loved being on the news!

Final Project

Our classroom made a quilt from all reused materials. This project was like the wind, forever blowing into the future.