Exploring the Weather- The Sun

Our Weather Inquiry has been morphing into a sky inquiry as time goes on. The kids have been investigating the clouds, but one day this week, there were no clouds in the sky to investigate! One of the girls piped up, "Well, I wonder lots of things about the sun! Can we explore that?" Um...yes!!! So we came up with things they had in their Schema already about the sun, and what they wondered. They wondered how it moved across the sky and what what it was made of. One child said it made energy!

We investigated by reading books about the sun and watching videos about the sun. This began our new learning, but now we wanted to see how it worked! We started with the concept of heat energy. We put chocolate chips in little muffin cups and the kids explored them and documented what they noticed and what they were going to do with them. They also made predictions as to how the chips would change. 

We put them in the sun and observed the changes caused by the sun. While we waited, we felt the sun on our skin and some kids noticed how hot the benches and play equipment were.

After about 10 minutes, the chips were melted! We discussed the changes caused by the heat energy. The heat from the sun changed a solid into a liquid! We grabbed some pretzel sticks and decided to enjoy our experiment even more!

Of course, we went back in and documented the results of our fun experiment.

We will continue this inquiry by seeing what else the sun can do, how it helps us and how it moves across the sky.