To help 5th-grade students develop a sense of space, time, and dimensions, math teacher Malte Klimczak launched a project to create a planetary nature trail—right on the Steinmühle school grounds!
How long is 15 million kilometers?
How long is a meter? How long is a kilometer? And just how vast—almost beyond our imagination—is a distance of 15 million kilometers? —It’s impossible to visualize this, but even the youngest students at Steinmühle High School can get a sense of it: Along a 300-meter-long stretch, the planets of our solar system were to be placed at the correct distances from the Sun.
A small group chose “their” planet
Working in small groups, the girls and boys set up a station in the schoolyard for a planet of their choice. Geography quickly came into play: How big and heavy is the planet? How far is it from the Sun? And how long would it take to get there from Earth?
Using this key information, the students then designed an information board and a model of the planet—the artistic aspect. Using the scale—where one meter in the schoolyard corresponds to 16 million kilometers in space—they then calculated where each planet should be located in the “schoolyard solar system.” This required mathematical skills.
Explaining the Solar System in Five Minutes
To help people understand these very large numbers and their significance in terms of distance and time, illustrative comparisons were made: how many times one would have to circle the Earth, how many years one would spend traveling by car, and so on.
Since even younger children can develop a basic understanding of this, the young experts from Grade 5 presented their planet project to the students in Grade 4 at the Steinmühle Bilingual Elementary School. The fifth graders mastered the challenge of explaining the topic as clearly as possible in just a few minutes with flying colors. The fact that preparing for this presentation had taken several school hours beforehand was quickly evident in the quality of their presentation.
This fantastic project, which not only drew on interdisciplinary knowledge but was also implemented across grade levels and school types, must be considered a complete success. Creative, challenging—and yet accessible even to the youngest students at Steinmühle.
The sun—which is often mistakenly referred to as a planet but is actually a star—certainly seemed to be in a good mood on the day of the event. It cast its wintery rays over the Steinmühle grounds.
Angela Heinemann
