Hanging the Solar System

After a lot of thinking and planning, and going back and forth on whether it was safe or not... we decided to hang out papier mache planets. It was a lot of work and a little scary, but we did it! We jabbed wholes in most of them and then stuck rulers inside, kind of like ship anchors to keep them from ripping huge holes. We wrapped yarn around the ruler multiple times and then tied the planets to the two poles on our ceiling. 

We didn't do that with Saturn and Neptune though because their balloons kept popping and instead of being hollow they were rolled up paper towels. They were too heavy to hang so we made them little hammocks out of fishing wire. I dropped Neptune once.... about 10 feet; but it was safe. Don't worry! 

We also didn't hang the planets in order from the sun all the way to Pluto. We put inner planets on one pole (plus the sun) and outer planets (plus Pluto) on the other side. It was an inner versus outer set up and we thought that would work better for our presentation.