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Seasonal Changes

Science · Reception–Year 2

The same place in spring, summer, autumn and winter.

About the seasons round

One place, drawn four times. The same hill, the same field, the same oak, the same holly bush and the same pond in spring, summer, autumn and winter, so the question a class can be asked is what happened to THAT tree rather than what is in this picture. Tap anything to name it and the panel says what has happened to it since the last board.

The oak and the holly are there together on purpose. An oak is deciduous, so it goes from buds to full leaf to gold to bare branches; a holly is evergreen, so it is the same green on all four boards and only its berries change. That pairing is the Year 1 objective and it is the one thing a single picture of a season cannot teach.

The bar across the top is the day length, and it is the half of the objective that a printed poster leaves out: gold for daylight, dark for night, out of a whole day. It runs two thirds of the way across in June and under a third in December. The hours come from the same arithmetic as the Why We Have Seasons tool, worked out for about 52 degrees north, so the two tools cannot disagree about how long a June day is.

The seasons here are the three-month ones, March to May, June to August, September to November and December to February, which is the convention a primary scheme and the Met Office both use. The astronomical seasons start at the solstices and equinoxes instead, about three weeks later. The months are written under the picture, because the question a class is really asked is which season October is in.

The weather on each board moves: showers in spring, the grass in the summer wind, leaves coming off the oak in autumn and snow in winter. It all stops for a quiet classroom, and for anyone whose device has asked for no animation, and the board says exactly the same things without it.

How to use it on your whiteboard

  1. 1Tap a season to change the board.
  2. 2Tap the oak, the holly, the field, the pond, the sky or the day bar to name it.
  3. 3Tap Next to work round the board in order.
  4. 4Tap Show all for every label at once, and Hide to ask the class again.

Questions

When do the seasons start?
It depends which seasons you mean. The ones on this tool are the three-month seasons the Met Office uses: spring is March, April and May, and so on. The astronomical seasons start at the solstices and equinoxes, around 20 March, 21 June, 22 September and 21 December, which is about three weeks later each time. Primary schemes nearly always use the three-month version.
What is the difference between a deciduous tree and an evergreen?
A deciduous tree loses all its leaves for the winter and grows new ones in the spring. The oak here is deciduous. An evergreen keeps its leaves all year, dropping and replacing a few at a time, so it never looks bare. The holly bush is evergreen, and it is the same green on all four boards.
Where does the day length come from?
The tilt of the Earth's axis and a latitude of about 52 degrees north, which is the middle of England. It is the same module the Why We Have Seasons tool uses, so the numbers agree: about 16 and a half hours in June, about 7 and a half in December, and twelve at the two equinoxes. Further north the difference is bigger. In Lerwick it is about 19 hours in June and under 6 in December.
Why is the same place drawn four times instead of four different scenes?
Because the lesson is change, and change needs something to compare. Four unrelated pictures teach four scenes. One oak, bare on one board and in full leaf on another, is a question a class can answer by looking.
Is the weather here true for the whole UK?
No, and that is worth saying to a class. The seasons happen everywhere in the UK, but the weather does not: the west is wetter, the north is colder, and snow is much more likely on high ground. This is a lowland English field. Measuring your own temperature and rainfall is the fieldwork half of the unit.