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?