Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Make your own Sundial {experiment for children to go with Egyptian unit study)

Each and every Tuesday we have science day ( I loved the routine HERE!) During the term we are looking at many different things that the Ancient Egyptians did. This time around we made a human sundial (after all the Egyptians didn't have clocks like we do!!)
I got my inspiration from HERE and then added my own twist. I read somewhere if you face the sun at 12 noon then that is south. So we drew a circle around ourselves and marked the spot we were standing with a S for South while looking at the sun at 12 o'clock (Tassie time!) We then traced around ourselves in chalk. We kept going back each hour and tracing around our shadows seeing the different marks for each hour (just like a sundial!!)
 this is Hannah's circle,
 she loved to do different poses for each of her hour marks!!
 here you can see the 12 and 1pm markings.

The last reading we did was at 6 o'clock! It was super awesome and the children were HEAPS impressed seeing just how the sun moved sooo much!! (we didn't get a chance to take the picture of all the shadows drawn in as we forgot before they all got washed away!!)
I would certainly recommend this activity/experiment with your treasures! It was super fun, easy and very effective!! YAY!!
Smiles The Torrents

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