The Pluto Day That Almost Wasn't

Sometimes I get these great ideas and I plan them out and they go really well.  Park Week for example, the end of July/beginning of August 2011.
Sometimes I get these great ideas and I plan them out and they don't go as well.  Pluto Day, for example, February 18, 2015.

We had this idea to do a sort of model of the solar system.  I found a website to make a scale sort of model.  You plug in the size you want the sun to be (1 inches, 2 inches) and it shows you how big the planets would be (including Pluto) and the distance they would be from the sun.  Does that make any sense, what I said?
So we went to a park, Jeremy paced out how far it was across the park and we used that for our scale.  Then we figured out what size we could make the sun to fit Pluto across the field and figured everything out. 
Of course you can only do so much of a model because it doesn't show the orbits around the sun, etc.  But we mainly wanted to show the distance to Pluto (and the other planets) if the sun was a certain size.
So we put dots approximately the right size (you can't get Pluto that tiny with a pencil or pen) based on the size of our sun and we cut around the planets and taped them to some balls so we could see them from a distance.
So we did all this planning early on and then after school on Pluto Day we had after school snack and headed to the park (not as early as I would have liked).
And the park was full of soccer players.  Uh oh.  Our activity wouldn't work there.  So we went to another park.  The appeal of the original park we had plotted out was that it was flat.  There are other big parks but most of them are hilly.  Oh well.  So we arrived at the next park and there weren't as many people (and I remembered a sign saying "No organized sports" so I knew there wouldn't be a bunch of people doing soccer practice).  And the first thing the kids asked was, "Can we play on the playground?"  I had told them before we left that the reason we were going to the park was for a Pluto Day activity, not to play on the playground, but they still asked.  No, we're going to set up our activity and do it.  We're not here for the playground.
So as we were setting things up, I thought of something and asked Jeremy, "Did you bring the paper that had the distances and paces written down?"  Oops, he didn't.  Oh well, I could use my notebook that had the distances written down.  Except I forgot to bring my notebook.  Sigh.  Yes, kids you can go play on the playground. 

Luckily Jeremy's phone had internet access so we were able to go to that website and we did know the size of our sun to plug in for it to calculate distances.  So we got some paper and a pencil from the van and recalculated out distances from planet to planet, because we were just going in a line from sun to planet to planet to planet, and so on to Pluto.  So we gathered the kids back up, I stayed at the sun with Lucky (who I expected to fall asleep in the van on the way but he didn't) and Jeremy started showing the other kids the distance to Mercury then to Venus, and so on.  The first few planets were only about 5-7 paces each, then from Mars to Jupiter it jumped to 53 paces and by the time they were going to Uranus, they were going about 130 paces.  And once they reached Uranus, they ran out of park.  Oops again.  Apparently this park wasn't as long as the other park.  Jeremy said they needed almost the same distance again to reach Neptune and Pluto.  Sigh.
Oh well.  Things don't always work out the way we plan, but Jeremy said it was fun to see the kids' reaction when the planets started really getting farther apart.
And wow, this is a really long blog post, so I guess I'll end by showing you some pictures that Nichole took as Jeremy was taking them on a journey of the solar system for Pluto Day.

 

And look, the ball we used for Saturn already had rings.  Ha Ha.