From: Grades 3-5, Weather Class, Shelburne Community School, Shelburne, VT Discussion results from playing with the data for Sun Times: Using a world map we checked out the latitude and longitude lines…this is always a quick mini lesson: latitude lines run east to west like a ladder. Longitude lines run north to south….phew OK….next we looked to see if latitude has anything to do with our average minutes. Yes it does we discovered…latitude lines of 35-40 are very similar in the number of minutes of daylight. So latitude matters in minutes of sunlight. We were looking at the data and we noticed a possible mistake that Illinois might have entered their longitude information incorrectly. Illinois, when we were looking at longitude using the Tinker Plots program was an “out lying” piece of data. We also thought maybe Washington got their longitude incorrect. We continued to spend a lot of time on the study of longitude lines for different places. Why do some areas of the earth receive more sunlight than others? Tilt and rotation of the earth plays a huge part! As the earth spins, we have day and night. Does longitude affect the amount of minutes of sunlight that we receive? Using Tinker Plots, we looked at where the locations were plotted on the world map and discovered that the dots clumped together were getting the most sunlight. Therefore, both latitude and longitude do affect the amount of sunlight a location receives. We also discovered that the latitude and longitude lines affect the change in seasons.