Activity

Sunrise, Sunset

Curated and Reviewed by Lesson Planet
This Sunrise, Sunset activity also includes:

What locations on Earth get the longest number of hours of daylight in the summer? Hint: It's not the equator! Use real-world sunrise and sunset data to develop trigonometric models that can be used to estimate the number of hours of daylight at a particular location at various times during the year.

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CCSS: Designed
Additional Tags
Instructional Ideas
  • Use overhead transparencies for students to plot their models for their chosen cities, then place them all together to see how latitude affects length of sunlight
Classroom Considerations
  • It's possible that pupils may already know some of the answers to the leading questions from an Earth Science course
  • In addition to understanding period and amplitude, high schoolers also need to know how to make scatter plots on a graphing calculator
Pros
  • Teacher's guide has more suggestions for modeling with trigonometric functions
Cons
  • Internet access is suggested, not required, but some of the questions on the worksheet require learners to access a particular website
  • Nonstandard notations for a.m. and p.m. are used in the data table
Common Core