Feb. 5, 2025
“There are storms constantly on Neptune,” says Jackson Baker, a sixth-grader at Wilson’s Creek. “These white spots are storms on the surface that are moving.”
Wilson’s Intermediate School sixth-graders participated in a dynamic lesson on astronomy in Megan Keller’s classroom. In unit four of the sixth-grade science curriculum, students use planet diameter data and measurement skills to create 2D paper models of planets to scale.
Then, they brought the planets to life, drawing details on their paper planets and filling them with facts.
“This lesson is super engaging to students because they’re always interested in astronomy,” said Keller, a science and social studies teacher at Wilson’s Creek. “But it’s also a lesson where they learn the scale of our solar system, which helps us understand our place in it. That’s a foundational principle in science.”
Keller is one of several SPS science teachers who helped write the curriculum her students completed at Wilson’s Creek. After creating a paper planet model to scale, students lined up in the hallway to do a planet walk, precisely measuring the equivalent distance between the planets and the sun in our solar system.
In space, Mercury and Neptune are 2.7 billion miles apart. In Wilson’s Creek’s hallway, they’re 78 feet apart, but the 31 million miles from Mercury to Venus is less than a foot.
The planet walk helps students understand how close and far, and how large numbers can still be small numbers in the universe.
“This is the beginning of their understanding of space,” said Keller. “And science is always about wondering what comes next.”
