To kick off space camp, we all worked together to create our own colored versions of each planet. I had a little stack of flashcards with each planet on them (and some facts on the back), and we used those pictures to make our own, plus the sun and a few asteroids. I was really impressed at how hard these kiddos worked to recreate the images faithfully! So much attention to detail. My flashcards were copyright 2009, which means pluto was a bit of a blur. When G5 picked out that card, I pulled up some pictures from New Horizons to show the difference, and she used that as her example photo instead.

Next, I stacked the planets in order and asked them to lay each out across the yard where they thought it belonged. I didn’t tell them they were in order (which is how we got Saturn next to Venus here), and it was pretty interesting to see how they chose to lay them out. (It was a little windy - you can see we used a combination of loose change and random exercise weights to keep everything in place.)

Once they were happy with their setup, we went for a walk. We marked the location of the sun at the end of their driveway, and then took 6 steps forward, where we marked Mercury. I then asked them to run ahead and guess where the next planet would be. They were pretty close on Venus and Earth, but after that, the distances start getting so huge! We ended up most of the way down the street.

On our way back, we chatted a lot about the different planets compositions, and how spacecraft that were travelling that far got power. A neighbor down the road happened to have a telescope in his front yard for viewing NEOWISE, so we had a brief chat about that as well, and where the comet appeares in the sky.

When we returned, we fixed up our model! I rolled out a long sheet of butcher paper, and we changed our step scale to a centimeter scale, glueing the planets and other celestial bodies down along the way.

After that, I showed them a video of Samantha Christiforetti demonstrating and giving a tour of the crew sleeping quarters on ISS. After the video, I asked them what other things they’d like to learn about how things work differently in space, and jotted down their answers to find videos for the remainder of the week.

We were very nearly out of time at this point! They took a few minutes to start turning TP tubes into rockets, but that’s now a project for Tuesday.