Toilet Paper and Science??

First off, thanks to all you parents for supplying your child with a roll of toilet paper for school.  I'm sure you thought it was a curious request.  And then to be told by your student that it had to be at least 150 feet long. What could possibly be up with that?  We couldn't do science without it!  And thanks to the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco (http://www.exploratorium.edu/) for developing such a great tool to calculate planetary distances.

What is all of this about?  Toilet paper?  Distances?  Science?  How can all of this go together?

Over the past few days, we've been building toilet paper solar systems!  Yes, that's right.  Our entire solar system (including lowly dwarf planet Pluto) on a roll of toilet paper.  The Exploratorium started us off with a program to calculate the relative orbits of all of the planets if the sun was the size of a 1 cm cube (about the size of a pea).

We quickly realized that measuring each time from the sun out to each individual planet would take way too much work. (Would you want to measure out 43 meters all the way to Pluto?!)  There had to be an easier way.  Fortunately, there was.  Using the measurements that the Exploratorium program provided, we could calculate the distance between planets.  This fit readily with our study of decimals in math as we had to convert from hundredths of a meter into meters and centimeters.  Lots of decimal subtraction, understanding of place value, and rounding ensued!

Then came the measuring!  And teamwork.  And figuring out how you can measure out 11 meters in the classroom when eight other teams of students were trying to do the same thing without moving all the desks and chairs out of the way!  Could it be done?!  Of course!  Fifth grade inventiveness and teamwork really kicked in.

We will finally get to unroll our solar systems (and add asteroid belts) next week.  We will need a whole lot of space to do that.  There is only one place in the school where we can do this, and it's not the gym.  In the meantime, enjoy these photos of our solar system building in action.

Measuring with a partner--one person measures, the other holds the place.

Using teamwork in a confined space.

How far to Pluto??