Obtain, evaluate, and communicate observations about time patterns (day to night and night to day) and objects (sun, moon, stars) in the day and night sky.
In kindergarten, students begin to develop the practices that scientists and engineers use to help them answer questions and solve problems. Students ask questions, make observations, and collect data as they explore weather patterns on Earth and investigate how different Earth materials are heated by the sun.
In kindergarten, students explore how scientists use all of their senses to ask questions and develop hypotheses about the world around them. In this unit, students have been analyzing weather patterns and seasons as well as considering the role of the sun in heating the Earth. This page is an overview of lesson 8 in which students investigate different Earth materials often found in their school’s playground or schoolyard to observe temperature variation among different surface materials when light hits them.
In this unit, students explore science phenomena related to patterns that result from Earth’s rotation and the moon’s orbit around the sun. This page provides a brief overview of lesson two of this unit, in which students conduct two investigations and use the patterns they discover to make predictions about the future positions of the sun, moon, and stars in the sky. In the first investigation, students observe the sun’s position in the sky at different times of day, drawing a diagram (model) of the sun’s position above the horizon. In the second investigation, students use a sundial model to explore the relationship between the sun’s position and the length of shadows.
