Energy

We are going to start exploring ENGERY.  Energy is the ability to do work or to make change.  If you think about your body, in order to make your body move, you need energy.  It's not something you can tell when energy is present.  Seeing a light on, feeling the wind blow, feeling heat from a fire and hearing noises are all ways of experiencing energy.

There are two types of energy.  The first is POTENTIAL ENERGY which is a stored energy.  A car that is off but has a full gas tank, snow at the top of a hill, and food all have potential energy.  KINETIC ENERGY is the other type of energy and its the energy possessed by a moving object such as a snowball being thrown, my body while typing this blog post, and a moving car.

A lot of things will have both potential and kinetic energy such as a bouncy ball.  As the ball drops, it has more and more kinetic energy because its velocity (or speed) is increasing as it goes to the floor.  After it hits the floor and bounces back up, the kinetic energy transforms into a potential energy.  The amount of energy in the bouncy ball never changes (unless something else causes it to change like the impact of the ball with the floor) but it can continue to change back and forth between potential and kinetic energy.