Final Report from Prospect School (Grade 4), East Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Final Report - June, 2003

Prospect School (Grade 4), East Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Final Report from Grade 4, Prospect School, East Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Our class really enjoyed doing this project. We began by learning longitude and latitude and averaging. We read and responded to several letters from places that we thought would be very different from us: Singapore, Saskatchewan, and South Africa. We read encyclopedia articles on those places and compared the information with that which the classes had written. It made the other countries seem very real to us. It was amazing to see that the children were not very different from us at all. It was exciting to get even another letter back from Canada.

We used a thermometer to measure the temperature most days. Other days, we had to get the temperature from the newspaper. We computed the minutes of sunlight from the newspaper, too, because some days we had trouble getting our computers to work.

When we received the data, we rounded off the temperatures to the nearest 10 degrees and the minutes of sunlight to the nearest 100 minutes for 13 places. We used different colored stars and stickers to represent the rounded data and placed the appropriate star and sticker on each place on a world map. It was then easier to see a trend. We were surprised to find that places closer to the equator had higher temperatures even though they had the least amount of sunlight. Places between the equator and 33 degrees North had warm temperatures and a lot of sunlight.
Canada had the most sunlight but not the highest temperatures. It seems that latitude determines the amount of sunlight a place gets at a particular time of year but the temperature might depend on the direction of the sunlight rather than the amount. We tried to find a trend based on the longitude. We found that most places between 60 degrees west and 90 degrees west had temperatures that rounded off to 20 degees Celsius.

Next time, we would like to get more information from the computer and correspond with more classes. But we really enjoyed what we did this time.

E-mail: lwheatt@yahoo.com