[RebeccaH]

I am doing space as my theme with a year 2 class. I would like to make a display using circles to demonstrate the size differences. I wonder if anyone has an easy way eg Mercure the size of a tennis ball, Jupiter the lid of a bin etc. Thank you for any help. Also if anyone has any good ideas. Love to hear them. We will be finishing with a space day.

[churchr]

I saw this in one of my science workshops this past summer. These are the things they used... Mercury--marble; Venus--walnut; Earth--golf ball; Moon--raisin; Mars--acorn; Jupiter--basketball; Saturn--soccer ball; Uranus--softball; Neptune--grapefruit; Pluto--bean. The sun was a large hula hoop that they covered with yellow bulletin board paper.

A friend of mine created a very large "tent" using thick, black plastic. She used a fan to inflate the entire "tent." It was really neat and large enough for almost the entire class to fit in. She had painted the constellations, the moon, etc. on the inside. The kids loved it! They even used it for reading time. (I wish I had a picture because I'm sure it would speak more than my 1,000 words!!!)

[JohnV]

is The Exploratorium. Here is a link to one of their pages. The title is "Build a Solar System". There is a scale calculator in which you enter the size of the Sun and the program calculates the scale and the sizes and distances of everything else. It even calculates a scale value for the speed of light and distances to other stars and galaxies.

There are links to other very interesting sites such as weight on other planets and existing model solar systems.

The URL for this page is:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/

The URL for The Exploratorium home page is:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/

Have fun!!!

John