Final Report - June, 2003

We are a sixth grade Math class from Upper Township Middle School in Petersburg, New Jersey. We are in the southern part of the state.

We compared our graphs and found that many of our points fell on or near the line of best fit. We noticed that the minutes of daylight increased the farther north we went. The farther south the locations were, there were fewer minutes of daylight.

On the second graph, the relationships were not so clear to see. We think that the temperatures were warmest near the Equator. But if that were true, then we would have seen a better curve. We think that because our weather was abnormal for this time of the year, the temperatures were not where they would normally be on the graph.

By doing this project, we had fun finding some of the locations on a map. It was interesting to see how far away some of the schools were. We also enjoyed reading the introductory letters and looking at the schools' web pages.

We learned about the line of best fit, also. We started to keep track of the minutes of daylight way back on April 4th, and we are going to continue. We noticed that we were gaining 3 minutes a day back then, and now we are still gaining daylight, but not as quickly. We are going to continue to track the minutes of daylight to find out when we will stop gaining, and if it will stay the same for a while before we start losing daylight. We made predictions all along and looked for interesting patterns in the numbers.

We hope more schools will send in reports because we like reading them. Thanks for an interesting project!

Mrs. Deckard's 6th grade math class

E-mail: deckard@upper.capemayschools.com