Walking the planets

Think about teaching blind kids about the relationship of the planets – about the fact that the earth spins and orbits, about the fact that the sun is itself turning and revolving around a larger center in our galaxy, about…ok, that’s enough.

Well, these kids had already had some exposure to the concept of the earth revolving around the sun, and about the seasons and why we have them. But they didn’t know about the other planets, or have any idea about the relative sizes of them or their relationship to the sun.

Cindy and I thought about this, surfed the net for info and found a site that had instructions for making a to-scale model. It had the relative sizes of the planets (e.g. Mercury, a pinhead; Earth, a peppercorn; Jupiter, a chestnut etc.) It also told gave info regarding how many paces we needed between each of the planets – the Sun being an 8-inch ball, from which we were to begin.

On day one, we began by explaining what a model is and passing models of a tree and a house around the circle. Next we had Xiao Hua hold the Sun (soccer ball) while the other students took turns being the Earth. This meant that they had to spin and orbit at the same time (you try doing that without falling down after about 10 seconds). They enjoyed this process and were excited to continue with step two.

We moved down to the craft room and got out the Das Pronto air-drying clay. We started with the largest planet (Jupiter) – each child got a ball of clay and rolled it to make their representation of the planet. We repeated this with each of the planets, and between each we recited the names of the planets we had constructed up till that point. Then we left our models to dry overnight.

The next day we walked out to the front gate of the property. We sat the soccer ball down to represent our Sun. Then we counted off the paces of distances for each of the planets. The first few were easy: 10 paces to Mercury, 9 paces to Venus, 7 paces to Earth, another 14 to Mars – then the fun began: 95 paces to Jupiter, 112 paces to Saturn etc. By this time we were getting pretty hot and sweaty, since it was almost 2 p.m. Before reaching what used to be Pluto (but hey, it turns out that it’s just a moon or something now) we decided it was time to turn back and collect up our planets and head home for a drink.