What You Need:
Butterscotch candy (Sun)- Orange mini M&Ms (Mercury)
- Sno-caps (Venus)
- Blue Skittles (Earth)
- Red Skittles (Mars
- Chocolate sprinkles (asteroid belt)
- Yellow Dots with Red Hots or red mini M&Ms (Jupiter)
- Lemonheads with gummy Life Savers (Saturn)
- Purple Skittles (Uranus)
- Blue M&Ms (Neptune)
- Black construction paper
- White crayons or colored pencils or chalk
What Do You Do?
- Use your white crayon to draw 8 elliptical orbits around the center point (the Sun) on your black construction paper.
- Place each represented star/planet/asteroids in order on your paper.
- Eat your solar system!
What Happened?
The Solar System is made up of all the planets that orbit our Sun. In addition to planets, the Solar System also consists of moons, comets, asteroids, minor planets, and dust and gas.
Everything in the Solar System orbits or revolves around the Sun. The Sun contains around 98% of all the material in the Solar System. The larger an object is, the more gravity it has. Because the Sun is so large, its powerful gravity attracts all the other objects in the Solar System towards it. At the same time, these objects, which are moving very rapidly, try to fly away from the Sun, outward into the emptiness of outer space. The result of the planets trying to fly away, at the same time that the Sun is trying to pull them inward is that they become trapped half-way in between. Balanced between flying towards the Sun, and escaping into space, they spend eternity orbiting around their parent star.