A long, long time ago, when I was a Grade 7-8 Science teacher, part of the Gr. 8 curriculum a Space Science. In order to give some idea of the scale of the solar system, we set up a basketball (about 40 cm in diameter) in an open door of the gym. This door fortunately lined up with a straight and level, relatively untravelled street.
With the class, we then proceeded to move away from the sun, placing markers at the locations of the planets.
Mercury was 18 meters away, Venus 33 meters, Earth 46 meters, Mars 71 meters, Jupiter 240 meters and Saturn 444 meters. After that we went descriptive, as I explained that Pluto would have been 1.8 kilometers away.
The nearest star at that scale would have been almost 3,000 kilometers away.
By the way, try teaching a class of adolescents the names of the planets. Let me know when you get to Uranus.
Space/Science » in reply to re: I think that people who don't know if a planet is closer or further than a star...
Hands-on space science
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