It’s fun to show children the relative sizes of the planets; book illustrations are good, but this can be enhanced by obtaining different size balls – as small as a marble and as large as a Pilates ball and all sizes in between…  Based on the sizes of the planets in picture books, see if the children can pick out which one would be Saturn, Mars, and so forth.  Then, someone can be the “sun” and the other children begin walking around (holding on to the balls) as if to orbit the sun, starting with the planet closest to the sun first adding on each successive planet’s “orbit’.

Tags: balls, planets, solar system