Astronomy Unit: Inner and Outer Planets, The Asteroid Belt

We seem to talk about the planets about once a year, don't we?  This time we did a little activity that showed the four inner, rocky planets, the asteroid belt and the four outer planets, the gas giants.

In this picture you can see that the asteroid belt has two layers as well!

We did the inner and out planets speedy lapbook by homeschool bits (25cents) -- and even ED was into the cutting/pasting!

We also did the asteroid speedy lapbook. It was the perfect amount of writing for my two -- and it reinforced some of the basic information we had covered. We added those pages into our science notebook.

We also did a couple activities. One was a TOTAL flop (showing the elliptical orbits and how sometimes Neptune is the farthest planet)... except that I couldn't get it to work 5 of the 6 times we did it!  The activity above shows how an object in motion (the suspended nut) moved in the same direction despite being rotated on the lazy susan.