NCERT Solutions for Class 5th The World Around Us Chapter 9 Closing questions — Let us reflect

Tell it as a story of the year, from one season to the next, and say what you saw, smelt, ate and felt. A good answer names things — a tree, a fruit, a bird, a festival — instead of only saying “it was hot” or “it was cold”.

What a good answer must have:

1. The name of each season and roughly when it came.
2. One thing you saw in nature in that season.
3. One thing that changed in your own life — clothes, food, games, school.
4. One moment you remember clearly.

Sample answer

Our summer began in April. The ceiling fan ran all day and the road felt hot under my slippers even in the evening. We drank litres of water from the earthen pot and ate mangoes almost every day. The pond behind our lane became a patch of cracked mud, and the koel called from morning till afternoon.

Then, one afternoon in the last week of June, the sky turned dark grey in a few minutes and it poured. That first rain is the thing I remember best in the whole year — the smell of the wet ground, and all of us standing outside getting soaked while our mothers shouted from the doors. After that, everything turned green in about a week. Frogs croaked all night. We wore gumboots to school and my notebook corners stayed damp.

By October the rain had stopped and the sky turned a very clear blue. My grandmother took the quilts up to the roof to dry. We made a rangoli for Diwali. In November the mornings became misty and I needed a sweater for the first time.

January was the coldest. There was fog until nine in the morning and my hands went numb on the way to school. We had a bonfire on Lohri and ate gajak. Then in February the mustard field near the school turned bright yellow and the mango tree began to smell sweet. We played Holi in March, and by the end of that month I had put my sweater away again — and the whole thing was ready to start over.

Yes — most elders will say the seasons have changed. The commonest things they say are that summers are hotter and longer, that winters are shorter and less cold, and that the rain is less regular than it used to be.

How to do this properly:

1. Ask at least three people of different ages — a grandparent, a parent, and an older neighbour or a farmer.
2. Ask the same questions to each of them, so that you can compare the answers.
3. Good questions: “When you were my age, when did the rains begin?” “Did you need a sweater as early as we do?” “Was there a pond or a field here that has gone?”
4. Write down their exact words, and their age, next to each answer.

Possible reasons for these differences:

• Cutting down of trees. Trees give shade, hold water in the soil and keep the air cool. When forests and old roadside trees are cut, a place gets hotter and drier.
• Towns growing bigger. Cement, tar and brick soak up heat all day and give it back at night. That is why a city stays warm even after sunset.
• Ponds, tanks and wetlands being filled in. Open water cools the air around it. Once it is built over, that cooling is lost.
• Smoke and gases from vehicles, factories and burning waste. These collect in the air and slowly make the whole Earth warmer. People call this global warming.
• More vehicles, air conditioners and machines, each of which throws out heat.

Ask the elders in your family for the names they use, and write those in your book. Below are the names used in some Indian languages, so you can see how they compare.

Sample answer for a student in Uttar Pradesh: (a) Basant (b) Garmi (c) Barsaat (d) Patjhar (e) Hemant — but at home we simply say “Diwali ke baad ki thandak” (f) Sardi or jaada.

Fill each row from your own life — what your family actually cooks, what you actually wear, which festivals your family actually celebrates. Here is a fully filled sample you can compare with.

Say what you did, what was hard, what surprised you, and what you would do differently next time. The journal is not a homework book — it is the record of a whole year of watching, and the interesting part is what the watching taught you.

What a good answer should cover:

1. How you kept the journal — how often you wrote, and what you wrote about.
2. One thing that was difficult.
3. One thing you would never have noticed without the journal.
4. What you would do better next year.

Sample answer

I kept my seasons' journal in a thin ruled notebook and wrote in it every Sunday. Each time I wrote five things: the date, the weather, what the neem tree outside our house looked like, which birds I had seen, and what we had eaten that was new. Sometimes I drew a small picture of a leaf or a flower and stuck it in.

The hardest part was remembering to write. In the middle of the summer holidays I forgot for three weeks, and later I could not fill in what had happened, because I simply could not remember. That taught me that writing on the same day matters.

The best surprise was the neem tree. I had walked past it every day of my life and thought it never changed. But my journal showed that its old leaves fell in March, that it had tiny white flowers in April which smelt faintly sweet, that small green fruits came in June, and that birds came for those fruits. I had never once noticed any of this before I started writing it down.

I also learnt that the first heavy rain came on 27 June, and that the koel stopped calling by the end of July. Next year I want to add the time of sunset once a month, because the class chart showed that the days get shorter and I would like to see that happen with my own eyes.

Draw the same scene three times, once for each season, side by side. Keeping the scene the same is the whole idea — then everything that differs between the three drawings must be caused by the season.

How to do it, step by step:

1. Choose one scene you know well — a house with a tree and a pond, or the corner of your school ground.
2. Divide the page into three equal columns and head them Summer, Monsoon, Winters.
3. Draw the same house, the same tree and the same pond in all three, in the same position.
4. Now change only the things the season changes — the sky, the tree, the water, the clothes people wear, the animals and birds.
5. Colour carefully. The colours carry most of the meaning: yellow-brown for summer, deep green and grey for the monsoon, white-grey and pale for winter.
6. Write three or four labels in each column, with arrows to what they point at.