Workshop 3: Papier-mâché Solar System

This week’s workshop was about the planets of our solar system. I started out this lesson with a short activity the girls had to work together to complete. This lesson was all about working together on a collaborative project, so it was fun to start it out with a collaborative game. I realized afterward that this activity was a pretty good pre-assessment as well.

These girls already knew most of the information that was pertinent to the lesson, including the names of all of the planets and their order from the sun. They mixed two planets up when I had them number them by size, smallest to largest, but overall, they knew their stuff! I could have used more specific facts about each planet to make the intro activity more challenging for them if I had known they were already pretty knowledgeable about the basics!       

 As I went through my slideshow we did talk briefly about some of the different features of each planet; Jupiter’s red storm that’s been going for hundreds of years, Saturn’s rings, the discovery of flowing salt water on Mars, and the fact that Neptune and Uranus also have rings!

As part of the slideshow I showed a large image of each of the planets showing each of their colors and patterns in as much detail as possible.

These will be references for painting later, but for this lesson, I wanted the girls to use them to decide which planet they wanted to create.

This was another part of the collaborative process. I expected that two girls or several might want the same planet, and sure enough two girls wanted to make Saturn. In a collaborative project not everyone gets to do what they want, so learning how to compromise is important. In the end, one of the girls was willing to go with her second choice of planets.

 After a brief explanation of how I wanted them to blow up their balloons for their planets (keeping their balloon/planet size relative to each other so that Jupiter was the largest, Mercury was the smallest, and all was accurate in between) and a short demonstration of how to do paper mache, we were off!

The rest of the workshop was pretty quiet while everyone worked.

Pretty soon we had the beginnings of our papier mache solar system:

A few of the girls finished up early. I had some activities ready to go that relate to next week's lesson. Can you guess the topic of the next workshop from the photos?