Student Pages
From outer space, the Earth looks like a gigantic ball.
You would see some white clouds surrounding it, lots of blue sections which are the oceans and brown parts which are the continents.
The Earth’s axis is an imaginary line drawn through the centre of the Earth from the North Pole to the South Pole.
It takes 24 hours to spin the whole way round or make one rotation.
The time it takes to do this is called a day.
It looks small to us because it is so far away.
If you drove to the sun at 100km/hr, without stopping, it would take over 170 years to get there!
The sun gives us our heat and light so living things can grow and survive.
Without the sun, Earth as we know it would not exist.
It would be a dark, frozen place without any life.
However, if the sun was much closer, it would be too hot for most people, animals and plants to live.
We can see the sun and feel its heat for about half of each day.
As the Earth rotates, one side of it faces the sun, making it daytime. When that side faces away from the sun, it is night-time.
As the Earth is rotating and we have day and night, it is also moving around the sun.
It takes one year - 365 days - to move or revolve around the sun.
We call this orbiting.
As was explained before, the Earth revolves around the sun.
It does this tilted on its axis.
At the same time, the opposite part of the Earth is leaning away from the sun and gets less heat.
It is winter.
So when children in a place like Australia could be at the beach in their summer, children in a place like Britain could be throwing snowballs at each other in their winter
Science – Unit 3 – Lesson 2 – image – dog in winter
Downloads
Student Summary
Summary of student page information
Worksheet
Activities for students to complete
Investigation Worksheet
An experiment to consolidate learnings
