Year 5 Science Blog: Making Our Own Earth & Sun Models!
In Year 5, we got hands‑on with our Space topic and recreated models of the Earth and Sun, using torches and balls, to help us understand how night and day happen. It was full of brilliant scientific thinking and talk!
We learned that:
The Earth rotates (spins) on its axis, which is an imaginary line running from the North Pole to the South Pole.
The Earth spins in an anticlockwise direction, which is why the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west.
It takes 24 hours for the Earth to complete one full rotation, giving us daytime on the side facing the Sun and night-time on the side facing away.
Using our models, we rotated the Earth slowly and watched different parts move into the light and then back into darkness. Suddenly, night and day made perfect sense!
Some of us even tried spinning the Earth a little too fast… which would definitely make for a very dizzy planet!
We finished by discussing how this links to our Year 5 Space learning—especially the idea that the Sun doesn’t move around us; we move!
