From: CA Homeschool Family Global Sun Project Oct-Dec., 2006 Final Report We are a homeschool family. I’m almost 9 & in 3rd grade. My brother is almost 6 & in Kindergarten. We live in California. We love homeschooling! During the project, we recorded & averaged daily temperatures, did the Geography Activity, & sent in our information for the Language Arts Activity. We measured the daily temperature using a outdoor thermometer, at around noon each day, on our back patio. Then we added them all up & divided by 5 (the number of numbers we'd added up). We figured out the number of minutes of sunlight each day by going online & finding the sunrise & sunset times, then figuring out the math (60 minutes in an hour times the number of full hours, plus the extra minutes). We did not see any response to our Language Arts Activity letter. I did respond to people who wrote to me through the Global Sun Project website, & also to a girl who wrote to me because her mom is a teacher doing the project that has a daughter around my age. I concluded that some areas of the earth receive more sunlight than others because some places are closer to the sunny equator than others, & also because of the tilt of the earth & where the sun is in the sky. Sometimes, places that are close to the equator are not as hot as others in the same latitude because of the trees (vegetation) or because of the elevation (like if they’re in the mountains). Doing this project helped me learn new graphing skills, how to plot latitude & longitude, & lots about Australia (because I researched it). I also have a pen-pal there now (not part of Global Sun though). I also got more internet & typing practice & I started typing with my fingers on the proper keys. Some things I might do differently next time: I might wait until more people have posted their information, then choose to plot only the schools that sent in all of their information. This time, I started plotting a lot of the schools, but some of them never sent any more information or letters, so that was just plotting practice. I would also send my Language Arts Activity letter in sooner, so that I might get a reply. My mom says she would allow for a whole lot more time than she’d planned, since there’s a lot more to do than record the temperatures for 5-15 minutes each day. We look forward to our next internet based school project!