Journey North

I had read about Journey North's Mystery Class, Tracking Sunlight to Solve a Mystery but didn't think I would try it. But then my sister-in-law said she was going to do it, so I thought, with her as a support system, I would give it a go.

Turns out, this project was bigger than I anticipated. There is a lot of charting to do and I was anal about it. Therefore, I did a lot of the charting. While the kids were able to look up the information to report, and get started, I really wanted the charts to be "exact", so I ended up finishing up the shading of the charts. I guess, if you had a large class and could divide the kids into groups, and each group was in charge of one chart, then the work doesn't seem to daunting. But for two kids and one adult, it was a lot of work. There were a lot of sighs and grumbles when I'd get the charts out.

However, in the end, the charts were beautiful and really did show the kids a clear visual of what the sunlight was doing in different parts of the world, which I thought was worth all our hard work. Next year, perhaps we'll do fewer weeks, try it digitally in a spreadsheet, try glue and strips of paper, or figure out another way to do this so it's not so much precise coloring!


As we were reading the city clues and seeing if we could figure out what the 10 mystery cities were, we found ourselves glued to our globe. This was great in helping me incorporate geography and cultural studies without me having to do a lot of the research or planning. It just happened as we explored the globe or ran to the internet to see what else we might be able to find that would fit the clues

Some of the cities were very tricky and took a lot of time to figure out. Others were more easily discovered. In the end, I felt a bit of disappointment as we didn't correctly guess all 10 cities. Old feelings of school and failure came back to me. Wanting to do well and be the best. Yet feeling conflict, as this is not my area of interest and I did not want to spend any more time to get an accurate answer. After a few weeks, I went back to look and we actually got more right than I originally thought. For example, on one, we named the region instead of the city name, so, as the teacher, I granted our team a few points for that!

For me, this project was a challenge. Geography is not my strongest subject, so it was a stretch for me to display energy throughout the whole process. However, I do think it was worth it. The graphing of sunlight visually showed what they learned about the earth's rotation, tilt, etc. from studying the solar system earlier in the year. I love how the two different units tied into each other. And again, I love that we were able to huddle around the globe each week.