DIY Friday: Wind Engineer Project #2

Which Way the Wind?

The Little Voyager Weather Station already had a barometer and thermometer, but still wasn't quite complete. We needed to see the wind direction and the changes in direction to help us predict the weather! So today we built a weather vane. This project will actually count toward our Wind Engineer badge, even though it is also an option for the Meteorologist. There are so many projects to choose from, we will definitely doing more than the three required ones for each badge!

We started off with a book hunt -- looking for books with wind themes or events, and added them to our weather/wind non-fiction collection.

Then we gathered our weather vane materials.

Spiderman took our plastic container out to the play area and filled it with sand. 

We cut a tail out of an old file folder, cut a slit in one end of our straw, and used a glue stick (which didn't seem to really do much, as far as holding the tail in place) and slid the tail into the slit in the straw.

Rosetta colored other end of the straw with a bright red permanent marker. This is the end that will point to the direction of the wind. (Pointing north, means the wind is coming from the north and blowing south.)

Next, we pushed the pin through the straw, off center, closer to the tail end, 

as in the how-to video we watched.

Finally, we bent some pipe cleaners for wind direction indicators and stuck them into the sand. We used a compass to tell us which direction (N - S - E - W) to put in which location, once we were outside.

See our weather vane in action!