USA-Arizona


 * Mrs. Hamman's Class - Apache Junction, Arizona**

Wiki page created by Sierra

Our class has been learning about Bernoulli's Principle and the science of flight. We thought it was interesting to read on the wiki about all the people from cultures around the world who make and fly kites.

In our class discussion about kite flying in our area, we realized that we don't see people flying kites here in the desert very often. We think this is because of our climate. Our research showed that kites fly best in breezy conditions, when the wind speed is between 10-20 miles per hour. During the mild winter months in the desert area where we live, breezy days are rare. The average wind speeds in our area are much greater in the summer. In fact, during our summer monsoon season we often have violent, windy dust storms (called "haboobs"). However, our summer temperatures are typically around 110° F; most people wouldn't want to run around flying a kite in heat like that!

Even though our weather isn't ideal for kite flying, we decided to try it anyway. We found a website for a kite shop in Hawaii called Big Wind Kite Factory, which had a great tutorial showing how to make individual kites out of one piece of paper. We decided to try making kites using their plan. The site said their plan could make 20 kites for 20 kids in 20 minutes. We found we could each make a kite in less than two minutes! Here's a video of how we did it. media type="custom" key="13893214"

Once our kites were completed, we had to wait for a windy day! We watched the daily windspeed forecast here. Finally, on April 2, we had a day with wind speeds from 5-10 miles per hour, and we decided to test our kites. We had a great time learning how to get our kites in the air, and some of them actually stayed up for a little while! One student even brought a dragon kite from home to test. Here is an Animoto video of our kite-flying adventure. media type="custom" key="13893908"

It was fun to learn about kites and how they are made. We have started talking about how we can refine our designs to make them fly better.