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.

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. :)

Space Robots and Rovers

Some of the most interesting robots we learned about were the Mars Rovers and other space robots. We watched this video from the library and found it fascinating.

We liked this book, too.

This page lets you experiment with controlling a robot vehicle remotely. When you try to control one on the moon, there's a delay, and it makes it really tricky!

A video about the Mars rovers.

Here are some awesome pictures taken by the Curiosity rover.

The way Curiosity was landed is amazing!

And we couldn't believe that Curiosity has even found evidence of brine on Mars!

The children made their own rovers out of Lego. They were quite complicated! :)

Junie made one too. :)

Planetarium Shows

We visited both our nearby planetariums (planetaria?) during this unit. My brother Kenneth used to give the planetarium shows at BYU and they were always SO excellent. I could listen to Kenneth talk about the stars forever! I'm sorry to say that the current crop of BYU students hardly lives up to his legacy (the girls were reading their parts from a script the night we went, and not reading very well, either), but it's a fun field trip nonetheless. We'll have to go back again when they're doing a different show (the one we saw was showing us constellations in other cultures, which was somewhat interesting but not very useful for those of us still trying to learn landmarks in OUR night sky!).

A visit to the Eyring Science Center is never a waste of time, though. We always enjoy seeing the pendulum, the wave machine, and the other fun exhibits.

This exhibit showed the density of various materials, culminating with a neutron star. It was so heavy we couldn't even lift it!

Another day, we went to the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake. They have some really fun free exhibits, though the shows are quite expensive. This time, we went specifically to see an IMAX movie Sam's parents recommended to us, called Hubble 3-D. The astronauts who fixed the Hubble Space Telescope brought an IMAX camera with them, and filmed some really amazing footage. I thought even the parts that showed the astronauts suiting up, getting ready for launch, etc., were really fascinating (because it's 3-D, you feel like you are in the room with them!), but the shots from the astronauts' point of view, looking down at the earth as they floated next to the Hubble and worked on it, are mind-blowing. SO cool. There are a lot of great shots taken by the Hubble itself, also. We really loved the movie and felt like it was worth the (rather pricy) ticket.

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!

Scale Models of the Solar System (size and distance)

The sun (by Abe,) Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars

One of the first activities we did was pace out the distances, to scale, between the various planets in the Solar System. I always think activities like this are so memorable (we did something similar when learning about the amount of empty space in an atom) and fun. It's just incredible to imagine the vast distances we are talking about even in just our own solar system! Mind-boggling.

There are a few different ways to do this---this one uses beads and strings, so you could do it inside. This one is similar ("solar system in your pocket")

This one is really great, because it shows distance AND planet size to scale, so we would have done this if I'd been more prepared. Also I really love the writing style of the guy who wrote this up (clearly a passionate astronomer)

But we ended up doing this very simple walk, using the following numbers of steps:

To Get From: 

Sun to Mercury walk 3 steps 

Mercury to Venus 2.5 steps 

Venus to Earth 2 steps

Earth to Mars 4 steps 

Mars to Jupiter 27.5 steps

Jupiter to Saturn 32.5 steps

Saturn to Uranus 72 steps

Uranus to Neptune 81.5 steps

Neptune to Kuiper Belt/Pluto 71 steps

It was really easy and it fit (barely) in the space we were trying to use. I just made really simple signs on skewers to poke in representing each planet, so we could look back and see how far we'd come.

Pluto. The inner planets are waaaay back by the purple arrow---almost out of sight

Enlarged

Next we wanted to show the relative sizes of the planets. For this model, of course, we didn't show relative distances, and we couldn't include the sun either.

We used the following dimensions:

Mercury: 1½"

Venus: 3¾"

Earth: 3 7/8"

Mars: 2"

Jupiter: 44¼" (Tape butcher paper together to get desired width)

Saturn: 37 1/8"

Uranus: 16"

Neptune: 15¼"

Pluto: ¾"

We used a compass---or a string tied to a pencil (cut to the radius of the planet we were drawing) for the  larger planets---to make the planets the right size. Just learning how to do this was educational in itself, I thought. The older boys were quite pleased with themselves.

Sam even showed them how to do an ellipse, using a loop instead of a line of string. That was for Saturn's rings.

We colored the planets after we drew them, which took forever, but looked nice. Our butcher paper kept curling because it was nearly at the end of the roll. Annoying (the planets kept curling off the wall even after we put them up). We should have flattened them under something first.

We put them up in our stairway and it was really fun to walk by them every day (when they weren't falling down). I love the dramatic size of Jupiter and Saturn next to the tiny little rocky planets!

And there's always this cool "powers of 10"-type universe scale site (did you watch "Powers of 10" in high school science class? I love that movie)

Solar System Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

This unit was longer than many of ours have been---4 weeks. This corresponded with the 4 weeks of comp time Sam had off of work (which sounds great, and was, but let us not forget the 1 million horrible hours of overtime he had to work to get it). Anyway, it was so GREAT to have him around all the time, for many reasons, including that he could help teach this unit---and this is stuff he really loves.

I feel like the Solar System unit is this ubiquitous thing---everyone has to do a solar system unit, right? And I mostly picked it because there were a few specific areas I wanted to cover for second and fourth grades, but I (honestly) thought it wasn't going to be one of the more interesting units for ME. I thought I would remember it all from when I was in school (except Pluto being a dwarf planet, which I knew was a change). But . . . of course . . . I learned TONS of new things. I don't know if they're things I wasn't taught or if I just forgot them all, or maybe they're just new advances in astronomy, but I was fascinated. And the kids, of course, were too. (I always knew they'd like it.)

We already had our 180 days of school in when this unit began, but I decided we might as well keep going until it was time for the baby to come, since we were still having so much fun, and our "summer break" would begin after the baby was born. We took our time going through the material, since there's so much to cover: a day for each planet, plus several other related subjects like the sun and the moon and comets and meteors, etc. I had thought we would limit this to the solar system (not the more comprehensive "Space"), but the boys really wanted to talk about black holes, so Sam took a day to teach about life cycles of stars too.

A couple general resources:

This solar system exploration model is interesting to look at---you can zoom in and out on the different planets, see their composition, etc. We were getting our information from other sources so we mostly just looked at the pictures here, but it looked like their info was pretty good too.

This is similar, but you can look at various stars, and change what time period you're looking at too.

Spacesounds is cool---you can listen to various recordings related to space---broadcasts from the Apollo Missons, the beeping transmission Sputnik sent out, doppler recordings from the sun, etc.