Marbled Paper Jupiters

While looking for activity ideas, I ran across this post about Marbled Jupiters and was intrigued by the idea. We've done paper marbling before and I've always wanted to revisit it, since it didn't work perfectly last time (but was still fun!). This is also just the sort of thing that I only manage to gear up for if I have to, for a school unit! I am not normally a person who loves to do crafts with children, but when I make the effort, the kids always have so much fun!

The "marbled Jupiters" post has some instructions about paper marbling, but I thought it was explained even better here. In case that link ever breaks, here are the basic instructions:

1. Pour 2 cups of liquid starch (you get it in a large bottle by the laundry products in any grocery store--it looks like this) in a wide pan, then add 1/2 tsp alum, stirring until mixed. The alum helps the paint stick to your paper, and I think this is a key ingredient we were missing last time we tried marbling paper! The paint clung to our paper (we used cardstock, but I've also read that watercolor paper works well) much better this time!

2. Take several colors of acrylic paint and put several drops each into bowls or paper cups, one color per bowl. Mix a little water into each color of paint to thin it and make it easier to drop.

3. With an eye-dropper or just with a spoon, drop several drops of the paint onto the top of the liquid starch/alum solution.

4. Gently swirl and marble the paint with a skewer or a plastic knife. (At this point, since we were making Jupiters, we also tried to make some storm-like features, and even a Great Red Spot.)

5. Lay a sheet of paper gently on top of the starch/paint bath, pressing down firmly. You can submerge the paper slightly.

6. Rinse the paper in a clear water bath. (The paint won't wash off—amazingly! Because of the alum, I think.)

7. Lay the paper on a flat surface to dry, but be careful—the starch will make it sticky and once it dries it may stick to your surface! Maybe we'll try using wax paper as a drying surface next time.

This was a really fun projects and we LOVED our finished Jupiters! We hung them up on our bulletin board for display.

Jupiter and Saturn

On the day we talked about Jupiter I dressed up as Jupiter. The children thought this was really funny. (And it was!) :)

Malachi wanted to be Jupiter too. He wasn't as round as I was, though.

Jupiter is such an interesting planet. It has a huge magnetosphere; much bigger than it should be, from what else we know about it. So, of course it has aurora at the poles. We liked this video showing Jupiter's aurora.

Naturally, the children were fascinated when they heard about the Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter. Here is a video about it.

Saturn has aurora too.

One of our books had a picture of what Saturn would look like in the sky from its moon, Titan. (It looked something like this.) (Titan is one of our favorite moons anyway. It has lakes and rivers of liquid methane on it! So interesting.) Anyway, Sebby formed an instant bond of fear/fascination with "Big Saturn from Titan," and in his usual way of dealing with odd fears, he drew and talked about it endlessly. He has even composed a piece of piano music called "Big Saturn from Titan"(you can imagine what it sounds like). :) He says that he's not scared of Saturn in the normal way of things, only when it's "looking at you like a big eye in the sky." I guess I can understand that. Anyway, this video shows what several of the planets would look like in our sky, if they were as close to us as our moon is. The children, especially Sebby, wanted to watch it over and over again. (And he came and got into my bed after a nightmare that night. Coincidence?) So view at your own risk!