School-Age: Daylight Savings

Last week we learned about Daylight Savings Time, in preparation for Daylight Savings over the weekend.


1. Reading
We read "At the Same Moment, Around the World" by Clotilde Perrin.

The book discusses how all these different children around the world are experiencing a different time of day. At the back of the book, it teaches about time zones and who came up with the idea of time zones.

2. Discussion
Before getting into a conversation about Daylight Savings Time, I wanted to first teach the kids about time zones -- hence the book choice. The kids needed to understand a bit about how the entire world has different time zones (24 time zones in total) and why. Once we talked about time zones, I introduced the concept of Daylight Savings.

We talked about how long Daylight Savings has been around. The United States has been using Daylight Savings since the energy crisis in the 1970's, but different countries have adopted it (and gotten rid of it) off-and-on over time. There is a wonderful map of the world on Wikipedia that shows which countries currently participate in Daylight Savings, which countries formerly did, and which countries never have.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with the idea of Daylight Savings from a (humorous) letter he wrote the Parisians about saving candlelight. I shared a page from "Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin" by Gene Barretta that mentions this.

I would like to think Benjamin Franklin did not intend for anyone to actually use it, but many countries have adopted it during war times or energy crises in order to attempt to save energy.

3. Craft
For our craft, since we are gaining an extra hour of sunlight at the end of our day, we made sun catchers! I used paper plates that we cut holes in the middle of. I cut larger circles of contact paper. Before the program, my teen helpers attached one side of contact paper and put the paper plate with the sticky side up on our craft tables. 

The kids put down tissue paper and, once they were finished, the teen helpers and I put the other contact paper over the tissue paper to create a stained-glass effect. The last part was optional, but we used hole punchers to put a hole through their paper plate. They could use yarn to thread a string through and hang their sun catcher up in a window at home.

Notes:
This was actually a very informative program (for myself and for the kids). I did not know nearly that much information about Daylight Savings until I researched while putting together the program materials. And I was actually surprised that none of the kids seemed to know much about Daylight Savings or time zones. There are usually always a few older kids that know a bit about the topic. So it was a hugely beneficial topic all-around!