The windmill

First, students will watch the entire video and share their thoughts freely about it. Ask the students: “For you, what is air? ". Let them answer, then ask again: “Do you know any objects that work with the wind? » Once their ideas have been gathered, show the film a second time. Students will be asked to focus on windmills and explain what they understand about how they work.

Then suggest making "pinwheels" or windmills using the Eduscol resource

The teacher presents a windmill (prototype) to the students and then shows how it works and its different parts. Question: “How can it be made?” » Search for solutions: Students collectively develop manufacturing steps. Then, they read an instruction sheet together whose steps are compared to the students' proposals. Any missing steps are then identified.

Manufacturing and testing: In pairs, the students make a pinwheel. They test it and adjust their design if necessary.

Teaching unit and materials list

• [The air, material?](https://cache.media.eduscol.education.fr/file/Air/95/1/RA16_C2_QMON_1_air_Sequence_1_632951.pdf) on Eduscol.
• The air on the “Lala loves her class” blog.
• Make a windmill on librairie-interactive.com.
• The 4-blade pinwheel on les-coccinelles.fr

Cross-curricular resources

• In musical education: wind instruments and natural percussion (instrument making and composition creation) on the Nancy-Metz education authority website.

Kinetic art

Kinetic art is an artistic movement that offers works containing moving parts.

• Discover on its site Antony Howe's sculptures whose movement is produced by the wind.
• Discover in video Theo Jansen's beach animals, a trained physicist who puts his knowledge at the service of art and dreams up creatures that move by wind power alone.