Day/Night/Earth’s Rotation

This week’s science lesson was on how the Earth’s rotation causes Day and Night.   We used BFSU Lesson D2 and discussed how the sun was in different parts of the sky during different parts of the day.  We went outside a few times during the course of the day to look at where the sun was.   We also noticed how the sun shining through the living room skylight made a patch of light that moved throughout the day.   I was going to do an experiment where we traced our shadow during different times of the day (from Evan Moor Science Experiments for Young Learners) but we had a lot of cloudy days this week and I realized that most of my yard is pretty shady especially since we still have a canopy set up over our deck.
We did set up an experiment using our globe, camping lantern and a darkened room.  I put a post-it note person on the globe and we were able to turn the globe and show how our person moved from the darkness into the light. 

We did a coloring page from the Evan Moor Giant Science Resource Book, a Sun craft and an Earth craft to finish up our lesson.
For the Sun, we glued tissue paper to a paper plate cut to resemble a sun.  Georgie made his smiling.

For the Earth I wanted to do shrinky dinks but couldn’t find the package I had bought. (I did find it right AFTER we finished the lesson).  So, going with the same general idea, I taped clear acetate over a picture of the Earth and had the kids color over the green and blue parts to make a model we could hang in the window.  This didn’t work as well as I thought it would.  Neither kid wanted to stick with it long enough to really make a clear drawing.  It did give us a chance for a brief discussion of the continents and oceans.

Books we read:

Next week we will be finishing up this Unit by discussing the Phases of the Moon.