al-mofhariz

A few days back, I had a request to share with ya'll how I show scale models of the solar system.  Once again, Seeds of Science has an excellent model that I loved.  In the program, they have a printed sheet with the sun and the planets scaled down to be shown at 10 billion times smaller than the actual size.  (Imagine that!)   Unfortunately, it is copy written and I can not share it for free with you guys.  Sorry!

However, I can tell you what we do....We went outside with a our picture cards.

This is the sun.  I asked a student holding Mercury to go where he thinks he should be near the sun.  The students automatically thought they should be right on top of the sun. In truth, the student needed to be about 6 meters away from the sun.  Next, Venus was about 11 meters away from the sun.  Earth was 15 meters away from the sun and Mars was 23 meters away.
Wow...the next planet is Jupiter and that is 50+meters away...too far away to show outside in our school yard.  In fact, we discus…

Do you teach the planets?  We have just added them back into our curriculum and I am so glad that we did!  We have spent the past two weeks learning about rotation and revolution of the earth and the moon.  We also talked about the surface of both areas...we were able to compare and contrast what they looked like and felt like.  The students quickly learned that even though there are rocks, mountains and valleys like Earth - without air and water, there is little chance for life.  Astronauts must wear special suits to exist on the moon for even a short period of time. 

But what about the other planets?  We are using Seeds of Science's unit Planets and Moons which has a wonderful collection of planet trading cards.  If you do not have the kit, you can down load some from NASA here.  They are a lot larger than the ones that Seeds provides, but they do work.

The kids spent the day reading and sorting the cards - first on their own, then by size, surface features and distance from t…