Weeks 7 & 8: Planets

So, Emily wanted to do a project on Space and after our uninspiring trip to the Science Museum, I did a bit of browsing on Pinterest and came up with a new idea: we'd cut out and paint the planets, to scale.

This turned out to be great fun, with one note of caution: choose your scale before you start!  More on this later.

Emily had a great time doing the inner planets and she got to learn how to use a compass, as well as what the word radius means.  The photo below shows Mercury and Venus

Then this happened...

I'd chosen a very simple scale - 1cm:1000km.  And so Jupiter is 140cm across and Saturn isn't much smaller at 116cm (Of course, we didn't even attempt the Sun.  That would have been something like 14m diameter :D)  We had to roll up the rug, and break open a new roll of lining paper for Jupiter.  And then painting it with our tiny brushes took forever!  Thankfully Uranus and Neptune were much easier.  Then Emily wrote the planets' names and we stuck them on the walls all over the house with Blu-Tack.  Finding wall space big enough for all of them was a bit of a challenge.

I had a little extra fun figuring out distances at the same scale for a few of the planets.  Emily was pretty impressed to discover that if the Sun was as tall as our house, our little 5cm Mercury would be further away than her school, at 600m away.  Earth would be almost exactly a mile away, with Neptune 26 miles beyond that (assuming my maths isn't too far off!)

The planets can stay up on the walls until we move next month, but after that we'll take them down and decide their fate - do we throw them away or do we roll them up with all our other posters and drawings and take them with us?