The study of our solar system

We did a few visual's today to grasp the concept of how small we really are.  We took our basketball and a peppercorn and put them side by side.  The basketball is our SUN and the peppercorn is EARTH.  The kids as well as Mom were blown away about how ant like we are.  Next, we used the basketball and a marble.  The basketball is now JUPITER and our marble is EARTH.

For fun, we measured the planets our onto our driveway.  Jacob has the acromin below memorized so he was able to let me know which planet came next.  He was more interested in the size of the planet.  Ryan was intrested in how far away from the Sun each one was.   We used the book The Planets in our Solar System by Franklyn Branley for the distance in our driveway model.  We started with the Sun, of course.

My (Mercury) 36,898,000 miles from the Sun --- 2 inches

Very (Venus)  67,084,000 miles from the Sun ---3 inches

Excellent (Earth)  92,752,000 miles from the Sun ---4 inches

Mom (Mars)  141,298,000 miles from the Sun --- 6 inches

Just (Jupiter) 482, 546,000 miles from the Sun ---1 foot, 9 inches

Served (Saturn) 884,740,000 miles from the Sun ---3 feet, 2 inches

Us (Uranus) 1, 779,152,000 miles from the Sun ---6 feet, 5 inches

Nine (Neptune) 2, 787,892,000 miles from the Sun ---10 feet, inch

Pizza'a (Pluto)   3,658,000,000 miles from the Sun ---13 feet, 3 inches

Yes, we realize Pluto is no longer a planet.  But, we like Pluto.