Solar System Unit

All my kids love studying the solar system.  I think Ezra would just do that forever and be completely OK with it. But, alas, we must move on.  Before we do, I thought I would share the projects and lessons that we learned over the last couple weeks.  Starting with the kids favorite one, the yarn planets.

For our yarn solar system, we wrapped our yarn around a book, or deck of cards, anything that you could neatly wrap the yarn around.  We used various sizes to represent the sizes of the planets. Then you slide the wrapped yarn off, catch the yarn in the middle with a zip tie and cut the loops.  They turn out like little pompoms.  These are NOT to scale, that would be impossible. After we learned about the inner planets, we created them and hung them on the ceiling. We then discussed the asteroid belt and the size of asteroids. The Vesta asteroid is the size of a Buick!  Ezra loved that little piece of information.  Also, the United States has a satellite that orbits the asteroid Ceres.  We continued on to outer planets and did them the same way, learning that there are a LOT of moons on the gas giants.  We only labeled a few of those.

Our yarn planets took an entire week to get done, as we learned about many moons and orbits and how Pluto is no longer a planet, (say what?!)

We spent a ton of time using stellarium.org.  

This is the screenshot of the stars that over our house right now. It shows the constellations and the planets. You can toggle what you want to view. This program was worth the download.

This is the link to the worksheets the kids used to learn inner and outer planets.  It’s a freebie on teacherpayteacher and I love freebies!

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Solar-System-Activity-Planets-Sorts-3-Freebie-2534317

I also used my favorite site, 123homeschool4me , for the quizzes and writing assignments.

http://www.123homeschool4me.com/2015/06/solar-system-worksheets.html#more 

We are moving on next week to some new materials, but this was a great study.