Planet Scales

This is a great activity! It's a great way to model and reinforce the concept of the size of the solar system. It's also a great way to keep students engaged and doing math and science. H... See More

This is a great activity! It's a great way to model and reinforce the concept of the size of the solar system. It's also a great way to keep students engaged and doing math and science. How fun for kids to be able to be outside, collecting data (which isn't a fun thing to do for them) and really beginning to understand the size of the solar system.

Out of This World: Planning a Planetary Trip

This article showed how third and fourth graders explored distances on the school grounds in order to gain a better understanding of the astronomical distances between inner and outer planet... See More

This article showed how third and fourth graders explored distances on the school grounds in order to gain a better understanding of the astronomical distances between inner and outer planets. Mathematically they practiced their division skills as they created metric scale models of themselves and the solar system. I liked how the author placed students into pairs to research a planet and do activities that would mimic the work of real scientists. Once students gathered important facts about their assigned planet, they went outside, found the Sun (the teacher), and marked off the distance from the Sun to their planet station. As soon as all stations were ‘manned’, a member of each team set off to gather clues from other planets until each team made a round trip. After all the clues had been collected, students assembled their data to decode a secret message. As a team member traveled from one planet to another, the travel time was recorded. Later teams compared time and distances. This connection of physically running between stations and keeping time measurements helped the students better understand the scale of space/time as they considered astronomical distances. Teachers wanting to replicate this lesson will need access to a large outdoor space, a trundle wheel and stop watches.