The Sun and the Globe

We had a fun science experiment today!  I didn't have all the materials needed but we were able to adjust and still make it work and we had some fun with it too!

The experiment was to use a globe and a flashlight in a darkened room to demonstrate day and night.

Well I haven't been able to get my globe yet :-(.  But what I did was use one of the boys toy balls.  I got their permission to draw on it and I drew some continents (kind of) on it.

Before we did the experiment we watched some educational videos about globes.  We found one really good one that explained a lot about the globe and the kids were able to see what a globe looked like and how it worked.  We also watched a  segment from the Paz show (from Ready Set Learn) where they were playing with and talking about globes.  (once again a HUGE THANKS to my mom for providing us with all of these videos!!)

So after that Seth had a good idea what a globe was and was able to see my make believe globe more like a real one.  At that point we were able to do the experiment with the flashlight and show how the sun shines on our part of the world during the day and when it is night it is because the sun is on the other side of the world. We also talked about how half the world is sleeping while the other half is awake :-)

The flash was on in this picture.  (we had the "globe" sitting on a jar)

This picture was done without a flash to give more of a true view of what we were seeing.

Our Sundial (and note about change of plans for blog)

Hey guys!  I was trying to do some work on our weekly wrap up blog post today and realized if I do a weekly wrap up post and include everything that I want to highlight and share it will make for a very long post each week.  I know that we all have very busy lives and I have found in my blog readings that I don't read long blog posts very well.  Most of the time I will just skim over them or even skip them all together because I just don't have the time.

And I realized that if I do a weekly wrap up post that you may skip over my post because you don't have time to read it and that would make me sad :-(.

So I am going to change things up a bit.  I am going to post as we finish activities and such and concentrate each post on just one subject/activity.  These will hopefully make the posts shorter and people will enjoy reading them.

So enough about that....

Our lessons this week are on the sun.  We started an experiment today on making and using a sundial.  For most experiments I will post at the end of the experiments to tell you how the experiment went but today I wanted to share how our experiment started.

We made our sundial today (an unsharpened pencil stood up in a ball of clay and placed on cardboard).  Seth said it reminded him of a birthday cake :-)

We got it made and talked about how there have not always been clocks or watches and said this is how people used to tell time.  We headed outside to put our first mark on our sundial...and we walked outside to the sky being completely overcast!  We set our sundial down and there was absolutely no shadow!  We learned right off the bat that you can't read a sundial when the sun is completely behind clouds!

Thankfully though a little while later the sun did come out from the clouds long enough for us to get a shadow and make our first mark!

(see our shadow on the cardboard?)

And the forcast for the rest of the week is cloudy and rainy - ironic, huh?  HA!

But that's ok - we will just continue this experiment through next week.  And I will post our results of the experiment and show all our markings then!