Sundials and writing practice.

Today we where learning about the Sundials as part of our Calendars Project, if you are bit lazy like me you will appreciate the ready made Sundial template from the met office that I downloaded and we will use that. (The site is worth visiting anyway even if not for the Sundial, they have some great weather experiments to do on there).

We made the sundial but we are waiting for our compass to arrive before we can install it and watch it in action. I will update here when we do that, we also have plans to do a sundial in the back garden which is larger, the instructions are here.

There is an Earth dial Project that has run since 2004 which aims to teach kids more about how time works on earth, you can send in your own earth dial design and they display it on the website, although this does cost, it is run by Bill Nye et al. It looks like something an older child would enjoy.

What we learned about sundials is that Babylonians invented a version of the Sundial but a lot of the references we found only refers to the Egyptians. This was a good time to reinforce with the concept of same but different using real examples of different sundials through the ages and also looking at the Babylonian Calendar. 

We talked about how both measure time in a similar way but different measures of time periods, one being hours and one being months/years.

The Babylonian calendar was the Precursor to the first Egyptian Sundial and was similar in nature.

It has certainly given them something to think about....

We also practised some handwriting and learning the months and days of the week, they already know these but it is great practice to put them in the correct order and do some handwriting.

We also did the spot the missing number on a number grid and to follow we did three similar poems with intention of discussing those differences, this has a couple of objectives and they are so that they can learn the different length of the months and where they occur and also sticking with our concept of same but different. these poems also point out the change over time of language used.

I am happy to share the worksheet that we did, I created this myself so there is no-one to credit this for apart from myself. Just click on the picture or here and it should take you to the download.