Our latest PLTW (Project Lead The Way) unit has us learning more about the sun, moon, and stars. The first part of our study has focused on the sun. We have been researching with books, videos, and even an experiment. For our experiment, the students made a sun tracker out of an index card and paper. We used a compass on our iPads to point our sun trackers North. Then every two hours, we went outside to mark the shadow on the sun tracker.
The students not only recorded a mark for the shadow, they also took photos each time. They saved their photos to their digital portfolios in the app SeeSaw. The students noticed that the shadow moved as the day progressed, the sun appeared to move across the sky. Since we were also research reading, the students realized that they were seeing evidence of the Earth's rotation. The children also made the connection that reading the shadows on the sun tracker was similar to reading a clock. These scientists amaze me!
The students compiled their conclusions in the Launch Logs. They also wrote some of their most interesting facts and we published their facts with some crayon resists sun art. On their fact writing, students used symbols to denote their thinking. A plus sign (+) means the fact is something they already knew, a minus sign (-) shows a fact that they learned, and an exclaimation point (!) is a fact that made the students say WOW! Check out our sun research in the hallway.
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