Final Report - December, 2003

Greetings from James Morris School! We live in Morris, CT and it is located about one hour outside of Hartford, our captital. We are in sixth grade and we study all subjects with our teacher and love every minute of it!

There were different measurements to take during the project. The first step in our project was to visit the website and play with it, such as learning how to use the conversion calculator and see how to go to the link that gave us our daylight minutes. We were divided into groups that were assigned to find temperature and the other group found daylight minutes. When we had our information, we had to go into our computer lab and put our data into a spreadsheet which was saved on the computer.

Conclusions - We concluded that some areas of the Earth receive more sunlight than others because the Earth rotates on an axis and the countries near the equator receive much more sunlight because at the center it does not tilt as much. As you move away from the equator, it gets cooler and the average minutes of sunlight changes. As you move farther south from the equator, the minutes of sunlight increase. As you move north from the equator, the minutes of sunlight lessen.

What we learned - We learned many concepts during our project. We reinforced our knowledge about how to use latitude and longitude, we learned geography, such as where Malaysia and Uzbekistan are, and we learned about the rotation of the Earth. If we were to do this project differently, we would take the temperature for longer than a week because during our week, we had warmer than normal temperatures. Also, we found plotting the information on the graph difficult so we would come up with our own way to graph the information. All in all, we had a really good time and would do this project again!

E-mail: CMaillet@rsd6.org