While working hard on making our school eco-friendly, the P.5 class have been learning more about our planet’s place in the solar system. Over the last few weeks we have been learning about the shape of our planet, and ways of proving its shape. As well as the size of the Earth compared to the size of other planets, and our Sun.
We found that, if the Sun is a size 5 football: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be various sizes of mustard seeds. Jupiter would be a large grape, and Saturn a slightly smaller grape. Uranus and Neptune would both be peas. The P.5 class enjoyed estimating the size of the planets and our Sun. Interestingly, we all assumed the Earth to be much larger than it is compared to other objects in our solar system. The children spoke about how they found it “hard to imagine things bigger than our planet”.
Later, we walked the distance between the Sun and the planets to scale, with the children guessing how far away each planet is from the sun. The P.5 class were brilliant at estimating the distances between the first four planets (approximately 10-meter jumps). A child later guessed Jupiter was 10 meters from Mars, the class gasped as we stepped out a further 75 meters (125 meters from the Sun). The class appeared increasingly surprised by the distance between the Sun and Saturn (182 meters), Uranus (460 meters), and Neptune (710 meters).
After walking most of these distances, we could see the large spaces between each planet and how tiny our Earth is. The P.5 class, and its budding astronomers, will certainly take better care of this little planet of ours.
Scale 1: 6,233,000,000
