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. :)