Journey North Mystery Class 2012 Begins

Journey North: Mystery Class began yesterday for anyone interested.  This is an excellent project-based science and math study.  I have not decided if I am going to be participating this year because of all the time spent preparing for Science Olympiad.  Our competition is in March, before the equinox, so we may have time to jump in then!

Journey North--Our Results

Yesterday was the dealine to submit results for the Journey North Mystery Classes.  Here is what I came up with for the 10 locations.  I include links to pages I made as to how these cities fit the final clues given.

• Perth, Australia
• Guatemala City, Guatemala
• SANAE-IV, Antarctica
• Hong Kong, China
• Mahikeng, South Africa
• Jerusalem, Israel
• Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Sarnia, Canada
• Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo
• Daegu Metropolitan City, South Korea

How do your answers match up?

Unfortunately, we will not show up when the answers are announced as 3 of my students came up with answers based on coordinates and did not check to make sure their locations matched all the clues.  Instead of Mahikeng we had Kimberley, instead of Sarnia we had London, and instead of Pointe-Noire we had Kinshasa.  We did not meet during Holy Week, and yesterday we had several of our group absent, and the weather was just too beautiful to sit inside for class, so I just submitted what they gave me.

Journey North Time!

While we are still continuing with Secrets of the Universe (having embarked on Liquids and Gases) it is time again for Journey North.  Most of the offerings starting in February, but by far our favorite is the Mystery Class.

This is our third year doing this project--an excellent example of projhect-based learning.  Using sunlight and cultural clues, you try to locate 10 mystery locations around the globe.  It combines science, math, and geography into one fabulous project.  This Friday is the first data set so it is not too late to start.  Just click the Journey North tag in the right sidebar to see my blog posts from last year.

A few weeks ago we went to the Boston Museum of Science since they have free Omni Theater Fridays in January.  We happened to see Whales, which was not the best Omni production I've ever seen since I am convinced they tried to instill sea sickness in the audience by turiong off the camera stabilization.  However, a good part of the movie talked about the Gray Whale migration, the longest of any mammal, and that got me thinking about another Journey North project.

I happened to look today, just in time to see the Journay North Gray Whales project runs on Wednesdays starting in February.  After looking through the site, and seeing they had the lowest numbers ever in 2010, I am excited to see so far they are reporting record calves in Mexico so far.  And so I have downloaded the data sheets and out together our journal to follow along with this project as well.  I hope to let you know how we are progressing.

We Found Them All!

I just thought I'd mention that we found all 10 of the Mystery Classes! The kids were very excited to see the posting on the web site and to see the locations displayed on the animated globe.

Wrapping Up Journey North

Yesterday we submitted our answers to where we think the 10 mystery classes are around the globe.  We'll be starting a new earth science project next week.

We did fairly well finding our locations, except for one--class #10, for which a math error caused some pretty interesting rabbit trails.  We thought it was somewhere in central Asia between India and China.  When we got to the clue about the prefecture being on a peninsula, we were baffled.  We did find that the Kunming Wujiaba airport was located in Yunnan Prefecture, which is shaped like a peninsula only it juts into another country instead of into water.  The funniest thing is that this airport is being replaced with a larger one called Kunming Zheng He International Airport.  Well, this same student also had Mystery Class #5 and that same week he had to find out about the Zheng He statue in Malaysia--we thought for sure we were on the right track!

The final clue had to do with a monument to a shipwreck on the peninsula, so we knew something had to be wrong.  I looked again at the calculation sheet for the longitude.  Sunrise on the equinox was 6:03 UT and was at 20:42 UT the day before, and for some reason I wrote the difference to be only 5 hours and 21 minutes!!!  Why, I have no idea, but what a difference 4 hours make.  The class was in Japan and not central Asia and after a bit of searching we eventually found the place to match the clues (at least we'll see if we did on May 7th.)

Mystery Class Math

A major part of this project is calculating photoperiod, that is the amount of daylight at the ten mystery class locations.

We've been doing this by figuring out how much daylight was gained or lost at sunrise and sunset and then adding or subtracting from the photoperiod for the previous week.

While doing MEP with my son, I realized that it was simple enough to do this calculation in a way that extends my children's understanding of place value and regrouping, as well as introduce bases other than base 10.

Many of you are probably already aware of how to make this calculation, but if not I hope you find this as easy and helpful as I did.

Let's say sunrise is 07:26 and sunset is 20:10.  We have two place values: hours and minutes.  We can only put the numbers 0 to 23 in the hours place.  Our sunrise has 7 in the hours place while sunset has 20 in the hours place.

In the minutes place we can only put the numbers 0 to 59.  Sunrise has 26 in the minutes place while sunset has 10.  Now set this up as you would any other vertical subtraction to calculate the photoperiod:

  20  10
-07  26

You cannot subtract 26 from 10 so you borrow from the 20 hours, making it 19 hours.  That one hour becomes 60 minutes in the minutes place, so the 10 becomes 70 (60 + 10.)  Now we have:

  19  70
-07  26

70 - 26 = 44 minutes, 19 - 7 = 12 hours.  The photoperiod is 12 hours and 44 minutes.

Journey North Update: Equinox and Longitude

We have been progressing well with our Journey North project.  Last Friday we received sunrise and sunset data for the equinox that allowed us to find the longitude of our mystery classes!  After studying maps, seasons, the earth's rotation and revolution, time zones, and universal time, we now have latitudes and longitudes for all 10 classes!

The following weeks will be dedicated to checking maps (including Google maps) and following whatever rabbit trails may arise from the geography clues we will receive for the next month.  And we're waiting to see when class 3 and class 8 will change their photoperiods.  They're hard to see, but one of them still has a 24 hour photoperiod while the other has zero hours.

Our graph will have all the photoperiod lines cross as we now on the other side of the equinox.  We found it interesting that the photoperiods far from the equator have non-liner changes.

It was rewarding to see the kids excited about finding their longitudes.  They were quite confused at first by universal time, local time, and sunrise but after more discussion they began to figure it out.  They were excited to see their hard work pay off.

Journey North Update

We completed the first two weeks of data recording. From the beginning until the spring equinox, all you need to do is record sunrise and sunset data, calculate the photoperiod (amount of daylight), and graph the data. Photoperiod reveals the latitude of the mystery classes since it is different for every latitude yet constant along that latitude around the globe. This gives you several weeks to explore related concepts.

Week 1 we investigated globes, maps, and the longitude and latitude lines on them. This information is readily available in most atlases. The National Geographic Xpeditions site has a lot of great information and related activities. I printed a copy of the world map for each student and gave them coordinates to mark to show how longitude and latitude gives you a global location. I assigned the program Globes and Their Uses on Discovery Streaming. We also learned about dividing a circle into 360 degrees as part of this lesson. We used the diagrams from the program to illustrate.

Week 2 we investigated the Reasons for the Seasons, watching the video of the same name on Discovery Streaming, and reading the Let's Read and Find Out book. There's a nice interactive on Teacher's Domain, too. They figured out why classes 3 and 8 (both of which Ds#2 has) have photoperiods of 0 and 24 respectively and near the equator is 12 hours. From that they learned that photoperiod indicated latitude, that north of the equator the photoperiod was increasing, and south of the equator it was decreasing. I even caught two math errors in photoperiod because the trend didn't fit that pattern. And now that we have a line drawn on our graph, the overall pattern makes sense to them.

Journey North Myster Class Preparation

The program begins on Monday so I go the kids ready during co-op yesterday.

I put together packets for each of them. Last year I had problems with the graph because it is on two pages and it splits at 12 hours--right where all the action is taking place. This year I folded the top of the first page right to the top of the graph, lined up page one with the graph lines on page two, and then attached them together with double-sided tape. I put this in the front pocket of the packet.

I downloaded the journal cover from the web site for the first page.

Next, since I have 5 students and we are finding 10 mystery classes, I put in 2 data sheets for each student. I went over the table, what data we would put in it, and what a photoperiod was. I then put several of the unchanging journal pages so they would be ready to go next week.

Discussing photoperiod was a good introduction to the 24 hour clock. Using Smart Draw, though you could probably use Word or any drawing program, I created a circle within a circle with clock lines on them. You can download it here from Scribd.

The last several pages are the vocabulary list and diagrams from the web site. Like they suggested, I just had the kids look at them and write down any questions they had. At the end of the project we will pull the cards out again and see if they then know the answers to them.

In my notebook I put a copy of the calendar, my own master graph for all the classes, a data sheet for our home location, and parts I needed from the two teachers' practice packets.

I will be searching my LibraryThing, the public library, Discovery Streaming, and the internet for related resources. More on that as they become available...

Journey North Time!

February 1st is when the next Journey North Mystery Class will start! Journey North is a series of seasonal projects by Annenberg Media. Most are related to migrations, and one is for gardening. Mystery Class is science, math, and geography all rolled into one!

Every Monday you look up the sunrise and sunset times for where you live and record the photoperiod (amount of daylight.) On Fridays you go to the website to look up the sunrise and sunset data for the mystery locations of 10 different cities around the world. Your objective is to find the longitude, latitude, city, and country of the 10 locations based on this data. What's really neat is graphing the data before and after the spring equinox.

This year I'll be doing this project as a class with the 5 kids ages 8 to 11 in our small homeschool co-op, and I'm really excited about it. The organizers asked for permission to use my blog graph image from last year, so I'll have to see if they actually were able to used it.