Earth's Tilt & Seasons Lesson Plan (TEKS 6.9A): A Complete 5E Lesson for Modeling Why We Have Seasons

Inside the Earth's Tilt & Seasons 5E Lesson

The 5E instructional model walks students through five phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. It flips the traditional lecture-first sequence on its head. Students explore a concept hands-on before you ever explain it, which means by the time you do explain it, they have something to hook the vocabulary onto.

I switched to the 5E model years ago and stopped going back. Kids retain more, ask better questions, and stop staring at me waiting to be told the answer. The Earth's Tilt & Seasons 5E Lesson is built on this framework from start to finish. Here's how it plays out across the five phases.

🎯 Engage

Day one is a teacher-led hands-on modeling activity using a small globe (or a Styrofoam ball with a pencil through it) and a desk lamp set up in the center of the room as the sun. Following step-by-step teacher directions, students take turns walking the "Earth" around the "sun," keeping the axis tilted at 23.5 degrees and pointed at the same spot on the wall the whole orbit.

By the end of the period, kids have sketched all four positions on their student sheet in their own hand, and they can explain in their own words why the same hemisphere gets summer in June and winter in December. Nobody has heard a vocabulary lecture yet. That's the point. They're walking into the rest of the unit with a working mental model, not a memorized definition.

What's included in the Engage:

• Teacher directions for the globe-and-lamp orbit activity
• Printable student observation sheet
• Answer key for the discussion questions
• Four learning objective slides (standard verbatim, "Model and describe" highlighted, "I CAN...", and "WE WILL...")
• An illustrated Seasons Word Wall in English and Spanish covering the unit vocabulary

🔬 Explore

The Earth's Tilt & Seasons Station Lab is the heart of the Explore phase. Students rotate through 8 stations (plus a 9th challenge station for early finishers) over one to two class periods. The Station Lab is split into four input stations (where kids take in new information) and four output stations (where they show what they learned).

The four input stations:

• 🎬 Watch It! — Students watch a short video on Earth's tilt, axis, and seasons and answer guided questions.
• 📖 Read It! — A one-page reading passage at two differentiated levels, with a Spanish version included.
• 🔬 Explore It! — A flashlight-and-grid investigation where students shine a beam straight down vs. at an angle on a piece of grid paper and count how many squares get lit (direct vs. indirect sunlight, made visible).
• 💻 Research It! — Reference cards with the Earth-sun system, the solstices and equinoxes, and Northern vs. Southern Hemisphere season charts.

The four output stations:

• 📋 Organize It! — A card sort where students place season characteristics under summer, fall, winter, and spring for the Northern Hemisphere.
• 🎨 Illustrate It! — Students draw the Earth-sun system at all four seasonal positions, label the tilt, and shade the hemisphere getting direct vs. indirect sunlight.
• ✍️ Write It! — Three open-ended questions in complete sentences (this is where you see who really gets it).
• 📝 Assess It! — A short formative check with multiple choice and a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary paragraph.

Print and digital versions are both included. If you want the full breakdown of what happens at every single station, what students produce, and how to set it up, that's in our dedicated Station Lab post.

→ Read the full Earth's Tilt & Seasons Station Lab walkthrough 8 stations, materials list, teacher tips

The Station Lab is included in the full 5E lesson. You don't need to buy it separately if you're getting the whole unit.

📚 Explain

Here's the real payoff of doing the Engage and Explore before the Explain: by the time kids hit this phase, they've already walked a tilted Earth around a lamp and shined a flashlight on a grid. They have a working understanding before you ever start naming things. The discussions get deeper, the questions get sharper, and you spend less time defining and more time pushing their thinking.

The Earth's Tilt & Seasons Presentation walks 6th graders through the full scope of TEKS 6.9A, one concept at a time, with diagrams on nearly every slide. The deck opens with a quick reset on what seasons actually are (four distinct weather patterns that repeat year after year) and the headline idea behind the standard: seasons occur because the tilt of Earth on its axis causes different parts of Earth to receive different amounts of sunlight at different times of year. The whole unit hangs on that one sentence.

Students learn that Earth's axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun, and that this tilt stays pointed in the same direction in space as Earth moves through its year. When the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, that hemisphere gets direct (focused) sunlight and longer days, so the energy delivered per square meter of ground is high and the heating time is long. That's summer. The North Pole is in constant daylight. When the same hemisphere is tilted away six months later, sunlight comes in at a shallow angle, the days are short, and that's winter. The Northern Hemisphere walks through all four seasons one slide at a time, with diagrams that show the axis, the sun, and a shaded daylight/night line on the globe.

Then the deck shifts to the four key dates that anchor the year: the summer solstice (on or about June 21st, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere), the winter solstice (on or about December 21st, the shortest day), the spring (vernal) equinox (on or about March 21st, day and night roughly equal everywhere), and the fall (autumnal) equinox (on or about September 21st, day and night roughly equal again). Students see how each of those dates lines up with a specific position of Earth in its orbit and a specific tilt orientation relative to the sun. A Quick Action INB has them match solstice or equinox cards with the right positions on a diagram.

The deck closes by flipping everything south. When the Northern Hemisphere is having summer, the Southern Hemisphere is having winter. Australia, southern Brazil, and South Africa are wearing shorts in December and coats in July. Same Earth, same sun, same tilt. Different angle of sunlight at the same moment in time. The deck includes a Think About It on living without modern technology in 700 A.D. and how tracking the solstices and equinoxes would have mattered for survival. That one tends to get kids talking.

What makes this Presentation different from a typical seasons slideshow is that kids are doing something on almost every single slide. It's not a lecture deck. It's a participation deck. "Your answer:" prompts appear on most slides, Brain Breaks reset attention every few slides, Quick Action INB tasks show up throughout, and Think About It prompts push deeper into bigger ideas (designing your own working model of the Earth-sun system, explaining season patterns to a 4th grader). The deck closes with a Check for Understanding tied back to the Essential Question.

The Explain materials in this product include:

• An editable 22-slide Presentation at two differentiated levels (Dependent and Modified), works in PowerPoint or Google Slides
• A guided fill-in-the-blank student notes handout that mirrors the Presentation, with answer key
• A Paper Interactive Notebook (English and Spanish) students cut, fold, and glue into their notebooks
• A Digital Interactive Notebook at both levels with answer keys, for 1:1 classrooms or Google Classroom

The Explain runs across two class periods. The built-in Think About It prompts are where the real discussion happens, so let those breathe.

🛠️ Elaborate

The Elaborate phase is where students stretch what they learned about Earth's tilt and the seasons and put it into a project of their choosing. In this 6th grade Earth and Space lesson, that's a Student Choice Project board with six different project options plus a "design your own" pathway.

Students might build a working physical model of the Earth-sun system using a Styrofoam ball, a skewer, and a flashlight to demonstrate all four seasons, design a four-page travel brochure for an imaginary tourist visiting the Northern Hemisphere in each season, or write and perform a short skit between a Texas kid and an Australian kid who can't believe the other one is wearing the wrong clothes for the month. There are options for kids who love to write, kids who love to draw, kids who love to build, and kids who love to perform. Whatever the project, the point is the same: students apply Earth's tilt and the seasons to a real-world artifact instead of a worksheet.

Choice is the whole point. By letting students pick how they show their thinking, you get more authentic work for TEKS 6.9A and you actually get to see what they understand about modeling the seasons.

Two differentiated versions in one file

The standard version is for students ready for independent application. The Reinforcement version is for students who need additional vocabulary or concept support. Three of the six options are swapped for projects with a tighter vocabulary tie-in, and "design your own" is replaced with "collaborate with the teacher" so kids aren't pitching cold.

✅ Evaluate

The Evaluate phase wraps the unit with a formal assessment. It's not all bubble-in. Several questions hand students a set of Earth-sun diagrams and ask them to identify the season in each hemisphere and then explain why.

The full assessment has 12 questions across five formats:

• Multiple choice (4 questions) covering the 23.5-degree tilt, direct vs. indirect sunlight, day length, and solstice/equinox dates
• Hotspot / visual (2 questions) where students circle the hemisphere experiencing summer on a labeled Earth-sun diagram and describe why
• Multiselect (2 questions) where students pick all statements that correctly describe a given season or solstice
• Short answer (2 questions) explaining why distance from the sun doesn't cause the seasons
• Multipart scenario (2 questions) with a four-position orbit diagram where students label each position with the season for each hemisphere and explain how the tilt produces the pattern

A modified version is included for students who need additional support. Fewer multiple-choice distractors, sentence-starter scaffolds on the short-answer items.

If you've taught all five phases, this assessment shouldn't surprise anyone. It's a chance for kids to show you they get it.