JoinScience Shorts: The Reasons for the Seasons
Ask a fifth-grader why he or she believes Earth has seasons, and the answer usually involves a mistaken notion about Earth’s distance from the Sun. However, the construction of a three-dimensional model of the changing seasons using simple materials has been successful in correcting students’ misinterpretation of the cause of the seasons (Lambert and Ariza 2008). In this lesson, students employ a simple model to learn how Earth’s tilt and revolution around the Sun causes our seasons.