Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Paperclip Solar System





It's one of those frigid days when you don't want to step outside of the house so my Schnickelfritz and I have had to amuse ourselves indoors.  We just completed a project to discover the relative distances between the planets of our solar system.  I found this in the supplemental website for Apologia's Astronomy book.
This first photo represents the first four planets.  The wall to the right is the sun so Mars would be the pink Lego on the left (we didn't have a red Lego).  We had to count 3-4 paper clips to find the releative orbits for each planet.


The white blob is Mars washed out by the flash.  The ball down the hallway represents Jupiter.  You can see we had to count a lot more paper clips.


 Many, MANY paperclips later we put down Neptune.  We actually ran out of hallway and house before we reached Pluto (which is technically not classified as a planet anymore).  Since it was in our book and since it's still a favorite in my mind we "went around the corner" to finish our paperclip line.

2 comments:

cbakerazle said...

You are an inspiration and the homeschool teacher I always wanted to be!

MOmama said...

You're kind to say so, but I want to be clear that I didn't come up with the idea myself--someone else had come up with the idea and done the calculations.

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