Kites have a long history and are easily made from local materials and can be flown close to where you live.

Kites are beautiful, fun and are great teachers about physics, wind, weather, aerodynamics, and more….

Spring is a great time to fly kites around Vancouver as warming weather caused air to rise and creates the thermal conditions for kite soaring.  Eagles and other birds of prey also like those thermals.

I found an interesting website with a challenge to build a kit from natural materials.  Click below to read the whole story.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/science/physics-and-astronomy/physics/challenge-make-kite-natural-products

You can try to build a kite where you live and the fly it locally and learn some principles of physics such as:  Newton’s Law of action and reaction and Bernoulli’s Theorem.

Here are the first 11 steps from the natural kite building challenge:

1. Take two 90 cm long sticks, one slightly thicker than the other.
2. Cut the thicker stick to 75 cm long (this will be your horizontal bar) and make pencil marks 2 cm in from each end.
3. Using a small saw cut tiny, slanted notches on the marks.
4. Mark the centre but don’t put a notch in it.
5. On the thinner stick make pencil marks 2 cm in from the ends and 20 cm from the bottom.
6. Cut a V-notch at the top of the stick and slanted notches at the other marks. This will be your vertical bar.
7. To attach the bars together, put the centre of the horizontal stick into the V-notch of the vertical stick and criss-cross a piece of string for a tight fit.
8. Attach the end of another piece of string to notch A on the horizontal stick.
9. Gently bend the stick down and wrap the string around the vertical stick at point B so the string is about 30 cm long.
10. Bend the other side of the horizontal stick and attach the string at notch C, another 30 cm long.
11. Then continue stringing the kite frame from point C to point D, from point D to notch A, from notch A to notch E and from E to point C.

Read the rest by visiting the site.

Like the kite illustration?

It was done by Jessica Hiemstra:

Jessica, now living in Toronto, has many fond memories of Vancouver. She went to school in Vancouver, but her dearest eduction in British Columbia comes from all the time she spent outside buildings – watching seals swim between classes, walking out on sand like glass at low tide at Jericho Beach, admiring sea stars, dark nights on stones and logs, long walks with tall trees, and rain. She’s not great at kite flying, but dreams of getting those sails up one day.  She’s written several collections of poetry, won a number of awards for her writing, art and set-design and lives on Lake Ontario (the Leading Sea) which reminds her of the Pacific Ocean some days, with her partner, photographer Paul David Esposti.