Energy

It all started when a lamp fell from a shelf and broke. There were so many questions about this event. “What makes the lamp work?”, “what is electricity?”, “how does a lightbulb work?” These are some very big questions and the subject is really not part of any preschool curriculum that i could find. I set out to try to approach this topic from a place appropriate for this age group. We read books and talked about all the things that work due to an energy source. We listed so many things! 

When talking about electricity you really need to start with energy or power. We asked the question “what is power?” Our friends had many answers, “power is when you have something magical”, “power is in invisible lines”, “energy is inside batteries”. The idea that it was “invisible” or “magic” kept coming up. So we realized that maybe we needed to approach this subject from a little different angle. We brought it back to our first question. “What makes things move, light up, work ?”.  “Do our own bodies have energy”? “Can we make things move?” One of our classmates was having a birthday and as is our tradition, we made whipped cream by hand. We noticed that the handle turns which causes the wheel to turn and the wheel turns the paddle inside the jar. We don’t need electricity because our own power made the whipped cream! 

We also had this cool lantern that lit up when we turned the crank. Everyone had a turn putting it together, which required following directions. When we turned the crank we discovered people power! 

We read a book that talked about wind power and that led to some great insights and many more questions. How do you get electricity from the wind?  Again this is a pretty complex subject for this age group. Using our own energy to make wind we moved objects around. The wind definitely has power! One book we read was about an island in Denmark that gets its energy almost completely from the wind. It was really awe inspiring to think about how the wind could make those huge turbines turn. A friend told us, “the sky is so powerful it makes the air move”.  We went outside to see the power of the wind for ourselves . It was moving the trees, the shade awnings and blowing leaves all around. Since energy can make things move it wasn’t hard to see that wind is power.