The Baldwin School (5th
Grade), Bryn Mawr, PA, USA
We are reporting from Mrs. Heckscher’s
fifth grade science class at The Baldwin School, Bryn Mawr, PA (40.0oN,
75.3oW).
We took five temperatures outside of the classroom at lunchtime each day
of the week in November and then we averaged them. Then we averaged the
averages. The first two days of the week were near record breaking warm,
but it cooled below normal for the last two days, so the average for the
week was near what the Weather Service says is our normal temperature for
this time year. It helped us to see why it is good to use more than one
measure for a project like this and wondered if the other schools were
having ‘normal’ temperatures or not.
We used Excel to make scatter plots of all of the data and looked at the
graphs to see if we could see a pattern that would help us decide if
length of day or temperature depended on how near you were to the Equator.
We predicted that the days would be longer and the temperature higher the
closer you were to the equator. So we expected that the line of the graph
should slant from a high point near 0o and go downward toward the higher
latitudes and down toward the more negative latitudes in the Southern
Hemisphere. (It should look like a mountain with the peek at 0o.)
When we looked at the graph of latitude and length of day, north of the
Equator the days were longer the further you went from 0o. But the length
of day kept getting longer (not shorter) as you got further from the
Equator in the Southern hemisphere. We think that the graph of the data
showed that the further south you go, the longer the days.
We also noticed that most people seem to live between 30o and 50o latitude
and decided that North Pole, Alaska was not really at the north pole. We
were not happy with our ‘line of best fit’ on the graph. The points made a
nicer curve than a straight line. Did this have something to do with the
Earth being round instead of flat?
We had trouble drawing lines of best fit on the latitude and temperature
graph. We tried to break it into smaller parts and ended up using two
straight lines. We concluded that the further south of about 20oN (instead
of the equator) you go, the temperatures go down a little bit. But, going
north from about 20oN the temperatures get a lot cooler, faster. We think
that this might depend a lot on the time of year. We also think that there
probably is a strong connection between the minutes of daylight and the
temperature. It would be interesting to see what the times and
temperatures are at a different time of year. Our science teacher got
really excited and said that we were going to have to have a lesson on the
reasons for the seasons.
We found this project interesting. We especially liked learning about
other schools near and far.
E-mail:
mheckscher@baldwinschool.org
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