We sometimes start our staff meetings with "appreciations," which allow us to step away from our "to do" lists and busy lives, and bring awareness to the positive. A few weeks ago, while on recess duty in "Haytown," the woods just west of the parking lot, I was struck by a feeling of gratitude for this area of the Hilltop campus. Here, I get to observe upper and lower elers engaged in fantasy ("Jay, would you like to buy one of these items from my store? They cost only two crystals!"), creating with nature (many structures built from tree branches, stones, dirt, logs...), and interacting with each other in ways they might not on the soccer field or playground ("So...when the elves come up this little hill, let's bring them to my store, OK?")

I am blessed to be part of a community that fosters imagination, creativity and the arts. I'm also grateful for the opportunities to observe children in this environment. Additionally, in Haytown, I myself gain inspiration, as I search for the perfect few sticks to make my miniature elf tepee, in order to place my "crystals" thoughtfully and artistically around the front entrance.

Students have direct experience of changes in daylight hours here in southern Vermont.  They become aware of just how short the days are in winter when the sun sets before 5 PM, especially near at the end of the calendar year, and how long the days are in summer, when they can play outside well after dinner time. The changes in daylight hours over the course of a year gives us our seasons.

The Journey North website website chooses 10 cities around the world and challenges our students to find them. Each week (for 11 weeks) they send us sunrise and sunset times for those sites. From this information, we can calculate the photoperiod, or length of daylight, for each site over the 11 weeks. For some of the sites, the days are getting longer over this period - as they are here in Brattleboro. Here in the Northern Hemisphere we are transitioning from winter to spring as the days get longer.  For some of the sites, the days are getting shorter, so they all must be in the Southern Hemisphere, making the change from summer to fall. Those sites whose photoperiod changes very little over this time must be located near the equator, where they get close to 12 hours of daylight throughout the year. Thus, we use a graph of this information to get a clue as to the site's latitude - especially as compared to us here in Brattleboro, at 43 ° north latitude.

To get us started in thinking about how the daylight on a particular day relates to its latitude, in early January each fifth grader was randomly assigned a latitude - say, 30 ° south. The child then finds a city located somewhere on that line of latitude, using the world map outside the UE classroom. They then look up, on the US Naval Observatory  website  the sunrise/set table for that site for a whole year. The graphs you see here show the daylight as it changes over the course of a year on 10-day intervals. Notice how the latitude influences the distribution of daylight over the course of a year: