This day and night Year 5 science worksheet explains the Earth’s orbit around the sun, and on its own axis. It tasks students with looking at daylight hours on the first of each month for a year.
Don’t worry though – you don’t need to be up at sunrise every day. The download includes a table with average times. Students can then plot this data on the graph provided and note any patterns.
Learning objectives
- Use the idea of the Earth’s rotation to explain day and night
- Learn that the sun is a star at the centre of our solar system
Day and night Year 5 activity
First, students need to complete the given table by working out how many hours of sunshine there was on the first day of each month for a typical year in a town in England.
They then need to plot the number of daylight hours for the first day of each month into a bar graph. What do they notice about the number of daylight hours during the course of a year?
Why do some months have more daylight hours than others? What else is different between the months that have the most and least daylight hours?
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