Observe the Sun’s apparent motion across the sky and analyze solar data from different locations to discover key concepts about our star and the Earth's connection to it.

Share and document your growing understandings of gravity and how Earth's history, tilt, orbit, and position in the solar system affect days, years, seasons, and the changing path of the Sun in the sky.

Build models that represent key astronomical patterns and processes. Our focus will be on creating clear explanations for how and why seasons vary across Earth—from the poles to the equator.

Use what we have learned to craft explanations of and design plans for a range of culturally significant astronomical phenomena.

Before towers of glass and glowing screens, people turned their eyes upward. The Sun’s climb, its slow drift across the sky, the way it slipped below the horizon—these were not just changes in light, but messages written across the heavens. The shifting arc of its path called to them, hinting at reasons and rhythms beyond the ground beneath their feet.

They gathered on hillsides and riverbanks, watching for the moment the Sun would rise in a notch between mountains, or set behind a distant ridge. Patterns revealed themselves—not only seasons and weather, but a sense of belonging in something immense. The sky was not decoration. It was the ceiling of their world, the stage on which all of life unfolded.

To look up was to remember: we are part of a story older than language, older than cities, older even than the soil we stand on. The same Sun that lights the streets of today once guided the hands of those who built monuments of stone and memory. And though our eyes are now often fixed downward, the answers we search for might still be waiting above, written in the quiet arcs of light and shadow.