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Scale Our Solar System
For this activity I created planet fact cards (see attached) I printed these out (4 to and A4 Page) and stuck them on some A5 Card with a scale planet on it.
Finding the scale planets is the hard bit. If you use a large beach ball for the sun then you need some very small bits for Mercury and Mars ( I used the coloured sugar for decorating cakes)
| Body | Approx Diameter at equator | Diameter for model | Suggested prop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 1 392 000 km | 45cm | Large Beachball |
| Mercury | 4880 km | 1.6mm | cake topping sugar crystal |
| Venus | 12 100 km | 4mm | small peppercorn |
| Earth | 12 756 km | 4.2mm | small peppercorn |
| Mars | 6 790 km | 2.2mm | cake topping sugar crystal |
| Jupiter | 143 000 km | 47mm | Large Bouncy ball |
| Saturn | 120 500 km | 40mm | Large Bouncy ball |
| Uranus | 51 100 km | 16.8mm | marble |
| Neptune | 49 500 km | 16.2mm | marble |
I also bought some string and some tags and measured out how far each planet was and tied a tag at each place.
| Distance from the Sun (in Million km) | Distance from the Sun Scale: 1:100 000 000 000 |
|---|---|
| Sun 0 | 0 |
| Mercury 58 | 0.58m |
| Venus 108 | 1.08m |
| Earth 149 | 1.49m |
| Mars 228 | 2.28m |
| Jupiter 778 | 7.78m |
| Saturn 1430 | 14.3m |
| Uranus 2900 | 29.0m |
| Neptune 4500 | 45.0m |
On the night we did this activity we visited a park. The girls got given a planet and then played a sort of top trumps on things like number of moons and size etc. discussing the differences and then we unrolled the string with each girl stopping when we got to her planet, you need a large space for this, but they found it fun.
This activity works well at the same time as Geocaching, we did both activities at the same time with half the girls doing 1 activity while the others did the other and then they swapped.
attachment:
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