Relative Size of Planets (February 7-10)
As a child, looking at Solar System picture books was a fascination, but I never realized how grossly inaccurate those pictures were in terms of relative size and distance of planets. Now that we are working on fractions, this is a perfect opportunity to create your own scale model of the planets. The attached pdf gives the instructions to create this model solar system using Play-doh. You do not need three pounds of it, but the larger the initial amount of clay, etc., the more possible it is to actually be able to see Pluto. When you are done, you will have a ratio of planets of
PLANET RELATIVE SIZE
Jupiter 1,200,000
Saturn 718,000
Neptune 40,000
Uranus 40,000
Earth 1,000
Venus 900
Mars 90
Mercury 9
Pluto 1
The Sun 1,960,000,000
Yes, the Sun is 1,960,000 times bigger than Earth and the Sun is 1,633 times bigger than Jupiter
Of course, I did not include the creation of the Sun in this activity as it would take about 1,000 times the clay that you use to create just the planets.
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Your activity this week is to do the same thing with the Earth's continents. The attached pdf takes you through a set of instructions where you can create the relative sizes of Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Australia. The questions I raise on top of the Continents map suggest that the traditional map of the world (Mercator) is also inaccurate in terms of relative size (not as distorted as the planets pictures, but terribly misleading).
Does African look like it is close to four times the size of Europe?
Does Asia look like it is twice the size of North America?
Does Antarctica look like it is only twice the size of Australia?
Does South America look like it is three quarters the size of North America?
Does Africa look like it is 14 times larger than Greenland?
Attachment | Size |
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Planets_Relative_Size.pdf | 639.96 KB |
Relative_Size_of_Continents_--_Play-doh.pdf | 326.44 KB |