Sun and Earth Model

One of my "goals" in homeschooling my kids is to give them lots of realistic visuals to help them grasp concepts.  Today, I made one such visual:
This is a scale model of the sun compared to the earth.  Wild, right?  I don't know that I've ever seen this perspective before.  The "earth" is a blue pony bead.  I used 109 of them to measure the diameter of the sun, because the sun is 109x bigger than the earth.  The sun is cut from "plastic" fabric that I bought at Walmart.  It's the sort of material that you'd use in a Halloween costume.  The radius of the circle was 18.5" so I drew that marking on my fabric and cut it out.  Since the fabric is plastic (like ribbon), I melted the edge of the cut fabric instead of hemming it.  Much faster and less frustrating since I didn't have to worry about adding to the circumference of the circle.

For extra math fun, I'm going to have my kids count out 109 beads along the diameter of the circle.  When they get older, we can talk about why the math works out the way it does.  They can also do conversions from the model size to real life.  This was all stuff that I struggled to understand when I was in school.  I'm hoping that my model will make it easier for my kids to understand these concepts.

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