A week and a half ago I took my kids to the NASA Goddard visitor center for a trip on Earth day- very appropriate, don’t you think?  🙂  Today was Space Day, and so it seems like a good time to share with you a fun activity we made up last week.

Following the trip to NASA, we were doing some reading on the solar system.  As I was reading about the rotations and revolutions of the planets and moon, I was thinking that understanding what revolved and what rotated was confusing, since we tend to think of those terms as meaning the same thing, but they’re quite different regarding the planetary orbits.  I took out a globe and showed them the axis, and then had them spin it so they could see it rotating.  Then I took the spinning globe and with the globe, walked around one child who I designated as the sun so they could see the rotating Earth revolving.

Then I thought it would be fun for the kids to all be the ‘bodies in motion’.  😆  I chose one child to be the sun, one to be the Earth, and one to be the moon.  This is where things got fun.  Earth rotates once every 24 hours on its axis, and revolves around the sun once a year.  So the child who was ‘Earth’ walked around the sun once to show the revolution cycle.

Now, the moon rotates and revolves around earth at the same pace – once a month.  So at the same time the ‘Earth’ child was slowly revolving around the sun, I had the ‘moon’ child revolving around Earth.  This was a lot of choreography!  The moon had to circle the Earth twelve times in the time it took for the ‘Earth’ to circle the sun once.  A lot of laughing and fun.

Then I had them change positions so they could each experience being the moon and the earth.  I explained to them that the planets would be rotating at the same time they were revolving, but that it would be too much for us to try to demonstrate all it combined.  Instead, I had the Earth child rotate on her ‘axis’ thirty times to demonstrate the monthly rotation of the Earth (I felt a month was enough to demonstrate, as rotating 365 times to show a yearly rotation schedule would be way too nauseating!).  She quickly understood why it would be hard to rotate 365 times while revolving once around the sun!

I involved three children in this, but you can do this activity even if you have only one child.  Choose a stationary object to be the sun, and you and your child can each represent the moon and the Earth.  One you start your real life demonstrations of revolutions, you’ll see other ways to take the same principle and apply it to more parts of the solar system, if you and your child/ren are still having fun!

(This post is part of the Carnival of Homeschooling.)

Avivah