As fifth graders dig deeper into their Patterns unit, they are beginning to uncover some trends that ultimately make them ask questions just like real scientists. As they uncovered that the Earth, Sun and other stars have a unique relationship that determines when they're seen, students are now questioning what the Sun can do to the Earth when it is visible in the daytime sky.

If the Earth is covered in land and water, does the composition of these materials affect anything that the Earth experiences?  For example, if the Earth is mainly covered in water, does water have a different relationship with the Sun that the land does?  Only time will tell.  So far, students have uncovered that the Earth is mainly made of water (nearly 70%) and that about 97% of that water is salt water.  Whoah!

Starting tomorrow, I will be on maternity leave, so my blog will resume next school year!

Here students created a physical model to show how the Earth moves around the Sun and determined that there were times during the year they saw certain things in the night sky and other times when they didn't.  They put this into words creating a 2-dimensional model to explain their thinking!

As the sun rises and moves across the sky, students have acknowledged that when we say this, it's really the Earth that is moving.  When the Earth spins on its own axis, this makes the appearance of the Sun change in the sky.  We noticed that as this happens, our shadows change.  But why?

Using simple materials, students were trying to make sense of what happens not only to the position of their shadows as it relates to the Sun, but also what happens to their length.  Check it out as we made sense of this phenomenon!

So the Sun appears the brightest to us because it's the closest star to the Earth. But why is it that we only see the Sun at certain parts of the day and then at night it disappears?  We thought that the Sun doesn't move as a star, but it appears to move across our sky?  Why is this the case?

Using simple materials, fifth graders are trying to explain this phenomenon and connect it to the sunrise and sunset data they've collected all year.  Way to go 5th graders!

Wow are we really learning!  Fifth graders are making sense of the relationship between the brightness of a star and how close it appears to another object.  By modeling and working on their explanations, students used quantitative and qualitative data to support their claims.  Students collected data from pictures, graphed them, and then made sense of the data as it related to the scientific phenomenon.

Awesome work fifth grade!  

wanted to continue moving in a straight line but we somehow connected to the Sun with a force pulling them inwards.  We'll be working on our models, explaining how these phenomena occur!