Final Report: December, 2002

Dear Friends,

Here we are again, reporting from Mrs. Salviolo’s Fourth Grade Class in Glen Head, NY! We are so excited to have participated in this outstanding project with all of you. Thanks so much for joining us in learning about our world.

We had a lot of fun gathering all the data together for this project. In our class everyone had a different job. For example, some students were facilitators and in charge of posting our letter to the project website. Other students were busy creating a class website. Photographers and researchers collected information for this website. Some wrote a Global Sun Newsletter to inform our school and community about this interesting project. Others served as cartographers, creating a display map marking the participating schools and downloaded pictures from their websites. As a whole class we recorded the daily minutes of daylight from the information we found in the newspaper. Also as a whole class we recorded the average daily temperature for each day. We collected this information from a thermometer that we placed outside our school every morning for one week. We converted from Fahrenheit to Celsius by using the Celsius Converter in the Reference Materials Section of the project website.

For our data analysis, we selected ten different schools world-wide. We chose schools that represented different latitudes. We included Alaska because it is the most northern location and Australia because it is the most southern point. We created a graph showing the relationship between latitude and minutes of daylight. We also created a graph showing the relationship between latitude and the average daily temperature (in degrees Celsius).

We noticed from the data that all of the countries or continents in the southern hemisphere have more minutes of daylight than locations in the northern hemisphere during this time period. This is true because at this time of year the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun. This causes the southern hemisphere to have more minutes of daylight because they are tilted toward the sun. We realized the seasons in the southern hemisphere are the opposite of the seasons in the northern hemisphere.

We also noticed that for the most part, the countries closest to the equator had higher average daily temperatures than countries further away. The one that threw us off track was Texas with an average daily temperature of 18 degrees Celsius, which was colder than some more northern points like California with an average daily temperature of 27 degrees. We were also puzzled by Peru, which had a lower average daily temperature than Australia, which is further from the equator.

We loved participating in this project! We had lots of fun and learned so many different things. We learned how to average. We learned about Fahrenheit and Celsius and how to convert. It was cool to look at the data from the participating schools. We learned about a lot of different places and have a better understanding of what life is like around the world. We hope we contributed to your understanding, as well. We wish you and your families Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.

DOWNLOAD: glenwood.doc
E-mail: Grace_Gorman@northshore.k12.ny.us