Making the planets

Cakey and I have been reading Martian Rock by Carol Diggory Shields. In this book a group of martians visit the planets looking for life in the solar system. It is a cute book that started a conversation.

We thought it would be fun to make some planets. I took the easy way out and bought styrofoam balls. For a split second I considered paper mache but decided that I would end up doing all the work – to ask Cakey to paper mache nine planets would be pushing it! By the way, I am including Pluto here as the ninth planet even though it has been re-classified as a planetoid.

I stuck the stryofoam balls onto wooden skewers and propped them up in playdough so that Cakey could paint all around them. I did guide Cakey towards particular colours and sizes for each planet – some she was happy to go along with and others she did what she wanted. I wouldn't call this scientific but it was fun. We based our information on some images found on the website Views of the Solar System.

from Views of the Solar System

This is what we ended up with:

• Mercury, small and brown
• Venus, small and pink
• Earth, small and blue and green
• Mars, small and red with glitter
• Jupiter, big and pink with red glitter stripes
• Saturn, medium and orange with a red glitter stripe (Saturn is supposed to have rings but that was all too hard)
• Uranus, medium and blue (also supposed to have rings)
• Neptune, medium and blue
• Pluto, medium and red with glitter (it would have been more accurate if it was small and grey but that was not enticing to Cakey)
• Stars, we had a couple of stars that we painted too

After we had finished painting all the planets Chris pointed out that we had forgotten the sun. Sigh! We had no stryofoam balls left so out came the paper mache. After 5 minutes of gluing on yellow, orange and red paper Cakey left me to finish it!

Our forgotten sun... kind of important for a solar system.

A couple of days later I attached cotton to our planets with a pin for the small ones and a screw for the larger ones and then we hung them up in Cakey's room.

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