The theme for this year’s British Science Week was ‘Time’.

In Year 4, we talked about how time is measured now and how it was measured in the past. We looked at images and a video about sundials, which were first used in Ancient Egypt and were adopted by the Romans in order to measure time from sunrise to sunset.

We created our own sundial models using paper plates and card. As there was no sunshine outside, we used torches to show how the sundial would have worked by casting shadows.  The length and direction of the shadow would have told people whether it was dawn, morning, midday, afternoon or evening.

We learned that when the sun is directly above us at midday, our shadow will be at its shortest.

Have a look at some of our sundials!