Sundials

With a week of wall to wall sunshine, my P7 class finally got out sundial experiment completed.  We made basic sundials.

 This group marked the base with chalk so they knew where to place the sundial each time.

 As we had to move them at break and lunch, this group found a good way of remembering where they had placed their sundial, using the playground markings.

The middle of a compass rose was also a good place to out their sundial.

Every hour (except 1.20pm which was during lunchtime) measurements were taken of the length of shadow and angle of shadow.

We then drew graphs showing how the length of shadow changed - decreasing then increasing.  The other graph was the angle - we got straight line graphs and worked out that the angle was the same each hour, which brought us on to the Earth spinning and why the sun appears to rise and fall and many other interesting discussions.