Toilet-paper Solar System

From the house

• A roll of toilet paper
• Paper scraps and a pen for labels
• A hallway or long room, at least 3.5 m (12 ft)

How to play

1. Write labels together for the Sun and the 8 planets, and put the Sun label at one end of the hall.
2. Unroll the paper from the Sun and count squares: Mercury and Venus go inside the first square, Earth at the end of it, and Mars halfway along the second.
3. Keep unrolling and counting: Jupiter at 5 squares, Saturn at 9½, Uranus at 19 and Neptune all the way out at 30.
4. Walk from the Sun to Neptune together: the four small planets are huddled close, and the giant ones are very far apart.

Fit it to your child

• Easier: Place just the Sun, Earth at 1 square and Neptune at 30, and walk the difference.
• Harder: Tell them that at this size the Sun would be as small as a grain of sand, and Earth too tiny to see.

Words to use

• far
• near
• count
• Sun
• planet
• Neptune

Why it helps

Counting squares turns enormous space distances into something they can walk, and shows how spread out the planets really are.