We just finished our unit on Planets and had a great time drawing the planets on the basketball court. Well, actually only up to Saturn made it on the basketball court. Poor Pluto ended up across the campus near the track and bleachers. The kids loved it.
The day before I found a web site that allowed you to calculate the size of the sun through Pluto. I wanted Pluto to be larger than a pin prick so the Sun had to be 100 inches. I had not thought it through thoroughly and we went into the resource room and took the huge white paper and started measuring 100 inches. WOW. I needed 4 sheets of the stuff and after taping it together and rounding the corners as best as I could, had a HUGE Sun.
The kids went to music class and I went to the classroom to figure out how to hang the thing. We do have 10 foot ceilings but i couldn't quite reach. Some of the sun gets sat on in read a loud. Oh well. The point was made with the 100 inch Sun and the rest of the planets drawn by the students on the bulletin board to size.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/
is the site to make your own calculations. It was perfect for what I needed.
I do know that Pluto is a dwarf planet, but as a class we rebelled and included it on our sketch :)
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