Global Wind Day is the international annual day for discovering wind power. It’s a day for taking the energy debate – switching to renewables from fossil fuels, supporting wind power – out of the realm of policy and in to the real world.
So says the website for the day.
One way to show children the power of wind energy is to share these two fabulous picture books with them.
1. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer.
This is the true story of young William Kamkwamba's childhood in a drought-ravaged Malawi. His family was poor and hungry. He had to give up school because his parents could not afford the fees for High School. Instead he took himself to the library, read science books and worked out how to make a windmill from scrap and salvaged materials. he wanted the windmill to produce electricity because his village had none and pump water so that they would be able to grow crops. At just fourteen years old and using a tractor fan and a wheel from a broken bicycle he managed to do that. This is a truly inspiring story for children.
2. Energy Island; How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed Their World by Allan Drummond. This is also a true story. It tells of Samso, an island in Denmark. It was an ordinary place except for the fact that it was very windy. The Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy chose Samso as an ideal place to become independent of nonrenewable energy and a teacher named Soren Hermansen was selected to lead the project. This was the beginning of a very communal project which created wind turbines to produce energy for the island.
These books have a mixture of story, factual information and science and both have amazing illustrations to keep even the youngest children interested.
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