I want all parents whose children come to these classes to know that I love teaching your children! It takes me a while to prepare the material and to tidy up our house before everyone descends upon us, but it is well worth it.
We had small classes this week. I hope everyone recovers from illnesses and looks after themselves for the rest of the term. Last week we finished off with a short quiz about the planets in our solar system. This week we built upon this activity. We first made a solar system jigsaw,
which led to some good conversations about scale (since the planets are not drawn to scale in that jigsaw, and the distances between them certainly are not). All groups then tried an activity about seeing planets (number 4.3 in the Universe in a Box activity book). I explained how the position of Mercury and Venus means we cannot see them in the middle of the night, and it is best to see them at dawn or twilight, hence Venus often being called the Morning Star or the Evening Star. Incidentally, there is a wonderful picture of Venus and Mars in the sky near a crescent moon as one of the recent APOD pictures. (26 February 2015: Love and War By Moonlight, taken by Kevin Bourque)
In one group we had a great discussion about what happens to Jupiter when an asteroid goes straight into the gas that makes up the planet. I haven’t found a link about this from a reputable website but it seems that if the asteroid gets close enough to the centre of Jupiter it just becomes absorbed into the core. Sometimes amateur astronomers manage to capture asteroid impact on Jupiter and I also found some photos of the damage that comet Shoemaker Levy did to Jupiter’s surface in 1994. The dark cloud of the explosion is larger than the size of our entire planet.
The younger group also modelled asteroids by breaking up bits of playdough and then squashing them together again (activity 4.4). The older group went outside to draw elliptical orbits with string and chalk (activity 4.5).
We also did a small scale model of our solar system by making the distance between the Sun and Neptune about 238 cm and the other distances were scaled appropriately. Next week we hope to get out into the field and do a larger scale model (scaling the distances to be metres instead of cm: Activity 4.6 in the activity book).
Additional activities
Visual
- Subscribe to the Astronomy Picture of the Day. There are some wonderful pictures on here, with short explanations by an astronomer so you can understand what you are looking at.
- Watch the Solar system video on BBC Bitesize.
- Also watch this very short video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining how long you might be able to survive on each of the planets in the solar system.
- Solar Walk app for tablets and smartphones.
- Get an app with a map of the night sky (I use Mobius Sky Map), or subscribe to updates from your local astronomy society or planetarium, and go out on a clear night to see what you can spot in the sky.
Auditory
- Watch the Neil DeGrasse Tyson video linked to above.
- Listen to one of the many Solar System songs on You Tube. We like this one but don’t know why they say Mars is boring. I think that’s lazy songwriting.
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Reading/writing
- Nineplanets.org website
- ‘Exploring the Solar System: A History with 22 Activities’ by Mary Kay Carson. This book may look simple but contains a huge amount of information about space exploration and our solar system, plus many worthwhile activities. For example, there is a smaller version of our elliptical orbit activity, using string, pencil and drawing pins (thumbtacks).
- For younger children, The Magic Science Bus Lost in the Solar System
- If you want to learn more about the solar system including the dwarf planets, ‘13 planets‘ a coffee-table book by David A. Aguilar, or for adults and older children, ‘How I Killed Pluto, and Why It had It Coming‘ by Mike Brown.
- George’s Secret Key to the Universe.
- Make a flip book showing the inner four planets rotating round the sun, and then answer a worksheet about your birthday on other planets.
- Play a Top Trumps style card game using attributes of the planets.
Kinaesthetic
- Do a jigsaw.
- Go on a Solar System Walk.
- Create your own Solar System model, perhaps using cooking ingredients like mustard seeds and lentils.
- Go outside at night with an app mentioned above and have a look in the sky.
- Get your own binoculars or telescope for astronomy.
Tactile
- Try the asteroid activity I mentioned above.
- Make scale models of each of the planets and paint them.
- Make pizzas decorated to look like the planets. (Thanks Natalie for the link)

- Or make a Spicy Solar System as mentioned above in the list for kinaesthetic learners.
And finally
We didn’t discuss exoplanets in the class, but this is a cool planet that has been discovered that is (so far) the only planet outside our solar system with rings that we know of – and they are 200 times wider than Saturn’s rings.
