Sunrise, Sunset

Since the Fall Equinox, the girls and I have been tracking the sunrise and sunset times. We made a chart on poster board where we record, for each day, the: sunrise time, the sunset time, the number of daylight hours and minutes, and the difference in daylight from the day before. In only 14 days, our daylight hours have already decreased by 20 minutes!

Our plan is to keep charting until the Winter Solstice, after which the days will gradually begin to grow longer again. My girls are surprisingly intrigued by this project; this morning they were enthusiastically announcing the sunrise time to the other kids at the bus stop (at which we arrived only one minute past the official sun-up time, gah!).

Try It! If you want to track the entire season, use the Internet to go back in time and catch-up on sunrise and sunset times where you live, since the Equinox (September 22nd). Or, from here on, use a poster board or nature journal to record the daily sunrise/sunset times (available online, or typically in your local daily paper). Alternatively, you could record the times weekly, on the same day each week.

* If you do this, let's compare notes! Post a comment here telling where you are and how many minutes of daylight you've lost since the Fall Equinox.