Round and round about

Sheel

Wheels… thinking of them brings up an image of Charlie Chaplin from “Modern Times” tinkering with the giant machine that has wheels, wheels and more wheels. Wheels have a very long history, and the influence they have had on human civilization and the world we live in is immeasurable. This project outlines some ideas which would be useful in conveying the impact of wheels on our lives, including activities, to be taken up over the space of six days. While it is aimed at the middle school level, parts of it could also be carried out at the primary school level. Teachers of various subjects would need to work together on this, and ideally, two consecutive periods could be assigned for the project each day. At the end of the week, arrange for a display of all that the children have learned and made.

Day 1. History: An introduction to wheels
The wheel is a familiar object for us today. So you could begin by asking children what exactly a wheel is. The answers that come up will undoubtedly contain two key points: a wheel is circular and it moves around a fixed centre. At this point, introduce the story of wheels, and discuss the development of the wheel as a mode of transport. NBT’s Inventions that Changed the World (Part 1) has an interesting write up by Mir Najabat Ali that you could use as a resource (reproduced at www.pitara.com/non-fiction-for-kids/features-for-kids/the-wheel/. A pdf of the book is also available at www.arvindguptatoys.com. NBT’s picture book The Coming of Wheels can be used at the primary level.)

You can demonstrate the difference wheels have made to transportation using the following activity. (Try it out beforehand, to make sure that it works!)

Activity: Rollers and wheels
What you need:
• a sheet of thermocole about two feet in length and
a foot wide
• 6-7 books (for weight)
• 5 tubes exactly the same in width and length, such as the ones found at the core of rolls of aluminium foil
• twelve soft-drink bottle caps
• twelve paper pins
• used refills (for bushes)
• a pair of compasses
• candle
• matchbox
• scissors

Placing the sheet of thermocole on the floor, load it with the books and ask the children to move it from one end of the classroom to the other. They can either pull or push the sheet.

Now place four of the five tubes about five inches apart from each other, and balance the thermocole sheet on them. Place the books in the centre. Again, the sheet may be moved by either pulling or pushing it. Is it easier to move forward with the rollers or without?

Now, can they move the sheet from one end of the room to the other without taking it off the rollers? (The extra tube may be placed in front of the sheet, and the sheet can be pushed on to it, freeing up the last roller which can then be placed in front and so on until the sheet reaches the other end of the room.)

Heat the compasses in the flame of the candle and pierce the centre of each bottle cap. At equal distances along the sides of the thermocole, tack six of these caps using the paper pins. Use 2mm pieces of the old refill as bushes between the wheel and the thermocole, as well as the pinhead and the wheel. This will ensure that the caps are able to move freely. Now place the books on this contraption and push it.

What differences can you note in the movement with the rollers and with the wheels? How much effort was needed this time? What has made the difference?

The curved tree trunk was perhaps the first roller, and enabled movement of flat objects across the ground with less friction and more speed. However, they are not as convenient as wheels.

In the activity above, the ‘wheels’ were fixed to the thermocole through the ‘pivots’ or paper pins, allowing easy movement both forwards and backwards. But what of two wheels joined to one axle (as in a cart)? Or two pairs of such wheels joined together (as in a car)? Ask the children to make a toy cart at home: Taking a matchbox, run a broomstick or a piece of used ball point refill through it, from end to end. Trim the stick so that it projects only slightly outside the box at both ends. Tack two bottle-cap wheels to each end. Tie a string to the matchbox at right angles to this wheel-and-axle toy cart, and pull. Isn’t it easy to give a direction to this cart, moving it in any direction you want? This is because the axle helps both wheels move together.

Ask the children to find out about the movement of wheels in bicycles, cars, or in any other vehicle. They can take help from any source, family members, friends or the Net. Also ask them to think about the various uses of the wheel. If possible, invite a potter to bring his wheel and demonstrate how the wheel is used to create objects of clay.

Also give them the task of collecting pictures of various kinds of wheels over the next four days – these can be used to make a collage on the last day but one.

Day 2. Language: What’s in a wheel?
That wheels enable movement is by now clear – but how? In moving, what can the wheel actually do? Before getting to this, the language teacher may discuss the parts of the wheel. Wheels have a centre, called a hub. They also have an outer circumference or an edge, known as the rim. In most wheels, for example the wheels of a cart or a bicycle, you can see the central hub very clearly. On a cart, there usually are wooden wheels with a rather wide rim, connected to the hub by thick, wide wooden spokes. The rim also has a metal ring around it, so that it can last longer. In the bicycle wheel, which is made of metal, the central hub and the rim are connected by thin metallic spokes. Instead of a metal ring, the bicycle wheel has a pneumatic tyre.

Try and elicit from your class various verbs describing the movement of a wheel. The children will come up with words like ‘roll’, ‘turn’, ‘spin’, etc. Listing them on the board, explain how all of these involve the rotation of the wheel around its axis – its centre, the hub or in some cases a pivot. The wheels on the thermocole sheet rotated on the pivot formed by the paper pins, while the two wheels of the toy cart rotated along a single axis, created by the axle that connected the centres of the wheels.

Activity: A wheel of a time
Get the children to write about riding a bicycle or getting on to a ferris wheel for the first time.

It’s time now to introduce a number of expressions that utilize the concept of a wheel. Ask your students if they’ve ever seen a ‘wheelie’. If they have, elicit a description. If not, show them a picture, and tell them that the concept of the wheel has given rise to many metaphors. Here’s a list of some in English1: help children find out what they mean.
• wheeling (as with birds)
• free-wheeling
• wheeling someone
• oiling the wheels
• putting your shoulder to the wheel
• putting a spoke in someone’s wheels
• being at the helm
• wheeling and dealing
• a hub of activity
• the still point (of the turning wheel)

The circular motion of the wheel also has metaphoric use. Events which repeat themselves are seen as cycles: whether the cycle of seasons, or the life-cycles of living things, and it has given rise to proverbs such as “What goes round, comes round”. This is what the Indian emblem, the dharma chakra, also signifies. The wheel thus has a symbolic significance as well.

You could share the story of Karna, the character in the Mahabharata who had to literally put his shoulder to his chariot wheel because it was stuck in the ground. Or the story of Abhimanyu, who was able to break the chakravyuha formation of the enemy army and get in, but was unable to get out. Such stories as well as wheel-related expressions could be the day’s lesson in other language classes too. For instance, the Hindi expression “chakravyuha me phasna” signifies the inability to get out of a difficult situation. (For the primary level, V. Suteyev’s Different-sized Wheels would make for an interesting reading and discussion session. A bilingual English-Telugu reprint is available from Manchi Pustakam, Hyderabad).

Day 3: Mathematics: Of pies and wagon wheels
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to know that wheels and mathematics are inseparable: what’s a wheel but a thick circle? You could use slices of lemon or sweet lime or an orange to illustrate the concept of a wheel very clearly – the circular skin of the fruit forms the ‘rim’, while the edges of the locules form the ‘spokes’ which connect the rim to a central ‘hub’. Use these to also point out the similarity between a wheel and the pie graph: the pie graph is a wheel in which different portions are marked off in different colours! Each colour refers to a certain bit of statistical information, and shows the connection of that part to the whole: this is where fractions or percentages come in.

Ask children if they have heard of the “wagon wheel” (in cricket). Bring in a picture of a wagon wheel based on real data, and ask children, “how many fours has the batsman hit, and how many sixes?” (If there’s a cricket fan in the class, get her or him to describe the wagon wheel.) The discussion would involve learning how the runs made are represented, using colour as well as the length of the lines. Put down these statements on the board – and in the course of the discussion, you might also be able to get children to understand how word problems may be phrased.

Activity: Wheel-tracks
This set of activities will require
• sheets of plain paper
• bottle caps (or wheels from broken toy cars, mechano sets, etc.)
• empty refills of ball point pens
• two round plastic bowls less than 2 inches high and 3 inches wide
• a lemon (or sweet lime)
• paper pins
• two and three inch nails
• paint or ink
• some string

(In each, the outer rim of the wheel has to be inked or painted.)

Divide the children into four groups. Each group gets to do one activity, and at the end of it, they have to describe what happened to the class.

1. Ask the children if they have noticed how, ordinarily, when a free-moving wheel rotates, it makes a straight line. Use an inked bottle cap/wheel to test this by running it across a sheet of paper. What happens when it loses its speed and begins to wobble? What kind of line(s) do you get?
2. Push a two-inch nail through the centre of a bottle cap. Rest the apparatus on a sheet of paper so that both the nail and the edge of the inked ‘wheel’ touch the paper. Now lightly push the ‘wheel’. What kind of figure results?
3. Cut a 5mm thick cross-section from a lemon, about one-third of the way from the top. The diameters of the two edges of the resulting ‘wheel’ should be different. Ink or paint the rind, and on a sheet of paper, run it like a wheel. What kind of figure results?
4. Around the sides of the small plastic bowl, fix four exactly similar bottle caps using different lengths of refills and nails. Put a long nail through the centre of the bowl’s bottom. Upturn it and place the whole apparatus on a sheet of plain paper. Spin the bowl along the central axis formed by the nail. What kind of figure do you get?

Use the activities above to clarify for children

1. that the wheel moves along a straight line when aligned at 90º to the surface it is moving on, but changes direction if it tilts (shown by the wavy line that is created when it wobbles).
2. the idea of a circle as a curved line travelling around a centre such that it is equidistant at all points from the centre and the concept of the radius.
3. that the curvature or unevenness of a wheel causes it to spiral.
4. a) the connection between the radius of a circle and the size of the circle it creates, b) concentric circles and c) circular paths.

Day 4: Science: Wheels and wheels
Bring in a bicycle wheel to class, if possible. Your students would surely have noticed that the bicycle wheel, like the wheels of cars, trucks, etc., has a double rim that is raised at the edges and dips in the centre. Try and elicit why this is so – the groove is what enables a tyre to be fitted onto the wheel, to make the ride smooth. Explain that this is also the kind of wheel that is used in pulleys, in which a rope is placed in the depression.

Ask the children where one might see pulleys, and what they are used for. Bobbins used in sewing machines can be used for demonstrating how a pulley works. Can they be used to lift heavy weights? How?

Ask: What other uses are wheels put to? List the responses on the board. Here’s a list of wheels used in different activities: potter’s wheel, spinning wheel, steering wheels, water wheel, roulette wheel, colour wheel, Ferris (giant) wheel, merrygo-round, and so on. Many games and pastimes also use wheels – the Spirograph, the Bey blade, etc. The compact discs on which we record music, images or other kinds of data, the pizza cutter (a circular blade), gears, the discus used in the sport of discus throwing, the discus which is a weapon (Lord Krishna’s Sudarshan chakra), etc. can also be called wheels.

Draw attention to the fact that the rims of these wheels are not necessarily smoothly curved. Gears, for instance, have serrated edges called ‘teeth’. In fact, there are even wheels without rims, such as the fan or the propeller, which have a hub with three of four wide ‘spokes’ called blades. Even spools like the ones children use to roll kite string on are constructions using the wheel – two, or sometimes three, wheels are connected together along a long central shaft, and also by thin slats of wood near the circumference of the wheels which give it a barrel-like shape!

Draw attention to the fact that wheels many be used vertically, horizontally or aslant. Sometimes, two or more wheels may be joined together to create fast-moving objects, propellers and gears in particular. One interesting toy that you can use for a demonstration is the spinning toy at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys/Goinggears.html. Make sure to test this out beforehand!

Activity: Turning wheels
Get children to understand the concept of gears with this activity: http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys/simplegears.html

Ask: Can wheels be used to change the direction or speed of motion, or both together? If so, how?

These days, there is an increasing variety of wheels. Office chairs and suitcases, for instance, are equipped with wheels that look like balls. Get children to examine such wheels. Can they figure out how they work? What enables them to turn in many different directions?

Divide the children into groups. Give each group an assignment to work on for the final day’s display: they have to make working models of objects that use wheels. Here are some suggestions²:
• turbines(Matchstick turbiner; Turbine sprinkler)
• propellers (Pen spinner; Multi-propellors)
• tops (captop; Aeolian top)
• moving vehicles (crafty cart; cone car)
• colour wheels (colour wheel; flywheel)
• illusion discs (Top patterns; spiral illusion)
• merry-go-rounds (Play round about; merry-goround)

The task for the children is to look up the instructions and read them, so as to collect and bring in what is required for making the desired object to class the next day.

Day 5: Art
By now, it is clear that the wheel is virtually everywhere. The number of uses we humans have put wheels to is astounding.

Make available a variety of round objects, from buttons and bangles to old CDs, and provide other material such as paper, stiff card, glue, scissors, needles, pins, empty refills, etc. Devote this session to helping the groups of children make the desired objects.

As they finish, they can move to creating a collage from the pictures of the wheels they have collected. They can also draw pictures of wheels in use, and create designs using a Spirograph or other kinds of wheels.

Day 6: Exhibition
Showcase the writing, the art and the models put together over the week. Invite the rest of the school to view the display.

References
1. Other language teachers could also list such metaphors, and share them with the children.
2. My one-stop reference for these objects is www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys. Instructions and/or short films on how to make them are found there. The specific toys are referred to within brackets.

The author is a writer, editor, researcher, and teacher trainer. She can be reached at sheel.sheel@gmail.com.