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.