Today, we enjoyed a fun Science experiment from Wild Science Projects About Earth's Weather.  My son is weather crazy, anything and everything to do with weather, he's into it.  And my daughter thinks its pretty cool too.  So all of the experiments in this book are on target with us.

The experiment we did today was on the temperature and season changes.  I felt with Spring upon us, this was a good time to make a great visual of why our temps and seasons change.  We have had lessons on this in our past "textbook" era, but never have we been able to make it so visual and hands-on.

Before the experiment, I gave them an overview of what we were doing and asked them why they thought we had changes in temperatures and seasons.  Then they wrote a couple of sentences with their thoughts and predictions on their Science Journal page.

All we needed was a sheet of white paper, globe, flashlight, and a dark room.  First, we placed the white paper on the floor, and for a better visual aid we used one of my son's little plastic men to put in the center (this was optional).  Then, they held up the flashlight straight overhead to illustrate when the sun is directly shining down and is hotter, and then held the flashlight at an angle to illustrate when the sun is hitting us more on an angle and the heat is less potent.

Then we used the globe to show how this concept makes our seasons happen.  By pointing the flashlight directly on the Tropic of Capricorn and demonstrating how the Earth travels and tilts.

Honestly, I learned a lot too!  I had some of my facts a bit crossed, so I enjoyed getting hands-on clarification about the whole subject too.

Then, Hannah finished up her Science Journal.

Apparently Alex was finished with writing for the day!!  At least I got him to do a little bit.