Practical Mom: Pumpkin Solar System

This year we carved our first pumpkin to enter the Science Themed Pumpkin Carving Contest at my kid's school. We had recently visited Santiago's Planetarium and I wanted to teach him more about the Solar System!

So we used a pumpkin for the sun, uncooked salt dough for planets, *lot* of metallic paints & a *lot* of glitter! (You can find some other interesting Preschool Solar System Projects on my pinterest board)

The Practical Mom: Solar System with Pumpkin & Dough

We first got a huge-ass pumpkin which positively killed my limbs with the ad-hoc carving! He had a blast painting it though! Tried testing yellow and orange to see what'll look best as the sun. The answer was : Neither did! (Gold & Glitter looked *way* better!)

The second pumpkin was expensive but very smooth to carve! I cut out long vertical strips (and short ones on the top) so enable some candle light to shine though. Wasn't necessary though, since it contest was in day time !

Kneaded some dough with flour, salt & a little water and rolled 'em into balls with relative sizes. Left the painting for my kid: metallic colors for all , while I concentrated on drizzling enough glitter on the sun.

Glued black chart paper (construction paper) on a thin wooden plank and drew 8 orbits with a white crayon. Placed the sun and planets and sprinkled a lot of silver glitter dust to make the night nice & starry!

I wanted to poke golden pipe cleaners onto the pumpkin as sun rays but with the few numbers I had, it looked too scanty. May look better of you've got a crap load of them.

(oh and btw, we won the contest!)

The pumpkin and balls of dough had to be tossed out in 3 days, so we substituted them with Pom Poms. Having 3 sizes helped! (Btw , I saw a cool set thermacol/ styrofoam solar system shapes in the mall!)

While plotting various pom pom planets on the orbits, we discussed how long each takes to orbit the sun. Earth takes 1 year, while Neptune takes 165!

(A ready ref for you: Mercury 88 days/ Venus 224 days/ Earth 1 yr/ Mars 2 yrs/ Jupiter 12 yrs/ Saturn 30 yrs/Uranus 84 yrs/ Neptune 165 and pluto 248...these are round figures of course)

The related book that we read alongside was Usborne Beginner's The Solar System. I love this series and makes perfect sense if you have a project or trip to accompany it.

Loved how he made a little smiley face in the spelling mistake where he accidentally wrote O :)

On our trip to the Planetarium which is in the University of Santiago premises (Which although turned out fun for him, was very boring for us, as it was a *lot* of non-stop talking in Spanish!)