Modeling the size and scale of the solar system

There are so many ways to do this, and a million ideas online. I'll just link a few resources we used.

This is a calculator where you can enter in the size you want your sun (or some other planet) to be, and get the scaled sizes of the other solar system objects that are proportionate to it.

This is a video about some students who made an outdoor scale model of the Solar System

This is a really simple printout of the planets all to scale with each other.

Here are some of the ways we modeled the Solar System last time we did this unit.

This time, we took a Solar System walk and were amazed all over again at how close the rocky planets are to each other… and how FAR away the rest of the planets are!

Standing at the "sun"

Children standing on the "rocky planets"…with a tiny Malachi almost out of view on "Jupiter," and Saturn, Uranus, and Nepture too far away to see!

We also really had fun putting up a paper solar system on the wall…scaled for size, but not for distance, of course. Last time we did this, we made Jupiter the biggest object and didn't even try to include the sun. This time, we made the sun as big as we could (on butcher paper) and then even Jupiter was relatively tiny next to it. We had to get up on a ladder to find a spot to put our huge sun! It was great to have it watching over us all during this unit. :)

Solar System Unit, Version II

click to enlarge

After the coronavirus shutdowns began this spring, and everything was closed, I had to think of a unit we could do without the benefit of the library! I rely heavily on our inter-library loan system for books, so it was hard to do without it. But as I looked through the books in our personal library, I realized that a unit on our Solar System would be perfect. We already owned many books we could use, and we'd done this unit before so I had lots of ideas for activities. I was surprised, as always, though, at how long it had been since we last studied the Solar System—seven years ago in 2013! Marigold hadn't even been born yet (I think I was expecting her at the time!).

One of my favorite things about teaching the children at home is watching them get excited about the subjects we're studying. Malachi has always been the one who loves Space (and really, how can anyone NOT love Space?) but during this unit, Teddy's interest really caught fire and he started poring over our Solar System books and playing Astronaut and Mars Rover all the time, just like Malachi used to. It was so fun to see!

To go along with this unit, we used a great series of videos from YouTube called "Crash Course Astronomy." (They have some specially "for kids" as well—but we liked the regular ones better.) They cover tons of information, but most of it is explained quite simply, and it's split into a bunch of different videos so you can take them one step at at time. I had organized this unit with basically a day on each planet, plus separate days for the sun, the moon, comets, asteroids, and so forth—so these videos correlated perfectly. We started with this one—Crash Course: Mercury—and went from there. You can see a whole list of videos here, or just search for the specific planet you want on YouTube.

Our second favorite group of videos were these called "Solar System 101" by National Geographic. That link takes you to a playlist with all the planets, plus some extras like meteor showers and exoplanets.

We tried out a few other video series, but most of them were annoying and/or had music that was too loud. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many "Kids' Videos" have that problem.

I will also highlight one of our favorite solar system books (and we have read many, many solar system books)—it's a newer one and the photos are spectacular. You can find Teddy looking at this book almost every day around here! It's called "The Planets: The Definitive Visual Guide to Our Solar System."

We tried watching some of these NOVA shows about the planets, and the imagery is really beautiful, but the narration and pacing annoyed us, so we didn't end up watching them all.

One of the first activities we did was make these rotation/revolution models (instructions here) to show the difference between those two terms. I thought it was fun to look back at the previous crop of students who made these last time I taught this unit! Little Sebby and little Abey!