Space and the solar system

This term we are all excited to be inquiring into the topic of space. Our heads have already been buried in books at school soaking up loads of information and sharing it with each other about the sun, moon and planets in our solar system.

To start our inquiry work we began by looking at what a day in our life looks like and what actually makes day and night. We already understood that we need the sun's light to make day but how day changed to night and back to day was something not all of us had thought about before. 

To help us think more carefully about how day and night occurs we used a globe to represent our planet Earth and a torch to represent our sun. We looked at the globe and when we shone the torch light (sunlight) on it only one side of the Earth was lit up. We knew that it would be daytime for any countries that had the sun shining on it and that it must be night-time for those countries that don't have the sun shining on them. 

But we had to think carefully about how the sun light got to those other countries. Some of us worked out that the Earth is spinning around and when it rotates the sunlight would then move onto different parts of the world making it daytime in some places and night-time in others. 

We also noticed that the sun does not move over to the other side of the Earth as some of us had earlier thought. We talked about how long it takes for the Earth to rotate and make one day and night and some of us worked out it takes 24 hours or 1 day. 

Then we wondered does the Earth move in any other ways. Yes! Some of us knew that the Earth also moves around the sun so we used the globe and had a turn at rotating the Earth at the same time as it moved right around the class circle around Quin who was the sun. 

How long would it take for the Earth to travel right around the sun?

Some of us initially thought a day, some a month, some a year, some a century.  We now know that the Earth takes a whole year to travel around the sun and we even worked out how many times we have traveled around the sun in our lifetimes. How many times have you traveled around the sun?

We then made models of the sun, Earth and moon which help demonstrate how each of these moves in space.