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You are here: Home / STEM Activity / Build a Lego Solar System Science for kids

Build a Lego Solar System Science for kids

By Jen

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We are making our way through our summer fun list and this week I decided it was time to learn about outer space…with a LEGO solar system. We are always looking for fun STEM activities to make learning engaging for the kids – adding LEGO blocks to the mix seemed like a fun idea!

build a lego solar system

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If your kids are curious about outer space then this activity will be perfect for them. We started by doing a little more research about our solar system, specifically, we wanted to learn more about the planets in our solar system.

lego solar system kid building

Books About Our Solar System

We started our exploration by heading to our local library and pulling out some great books about our solar system. The library had a seemingly endless selection of books about outer space, but these ones were our favourite for planet-specific information.

The Planets: The Definitive Visual Guide to Our Solar System by Robert Dinwiddie

National Geographic Readers: Planets by Elizabeth Carney

Cool Facts About Planets in Our Solar System

Through our research, we discovered some cool facts about planets that we could incorporate in our activity…

Sun – the Sun is 150 million kilometres away from the Earth

Mercury – is the smallest planet in our solar system

Venus – is the closest planet to Earth and it doesn’t have any moons

Earth – is our home planet…our distance from the sun allows for different seasons to exist

Mars – the “red” planet is currently being explored by the NASA Mars rover “Curiosity”

Jupiter – has over 60 moons

Saturn – the rings around Saturn are actually made up of pieces of icy rocks

Uranus – is actually spinning on its side

Neptune – furthest from the sun, it takes 165 Earth years to orbit the Sun

How to Make a Lego Solar System

After learning more about our solar system it was time to make get hands-on. We decided to build our solar system. While kids usually build a solar system with foam balls, we wondered if we could build each planet with LEGO blocks!

building a lego saturn

We started by making the sun…after all, it is the centre of our solar system. I simply gave my girls piles of LEGO blocks that had been divided by colour. They started with the pile of yellow blocks to build the sun, and then they moved on to creating all of the planets. Each planet has a unique colour and shape. While these planets aren’t perfectly spherical they definitely look like the planets they represent. As they built, we did more research and discovered more interesting facts about each planet.

The kids built their way through the entire solar system.

Once the planets were made, we moved down to the floor. We set up the solar system on the living room floor. They had to arrange the planets in the correct order, in terms of their distance from the sun. Can you spot Earth? Can you spot our moon? Pretty cool, right? Your kids could take the time to build all of the moons or maybe add the International Space Station!

logo solar system floor

After building our solar system on the floor we thought, why should we be limited by the confines of our indoor space when we could head outside to our driveway? We packed up our solar system and moved outside…check out our planetary orbit game for kids.

What will your kids’ solar system look like? How detailed will they build each planet? This is a fantastic, engaging educational activity for kids.

lego solar system social

More STEM Activities for Kids

child drawing planetary orbits

Make and play an outdoor planetary orbit game

Summer STEM Activities for Kids - Have fun and keep the kids learning with these super cool Science Technology, Engineering and Math activities for kids. | STEM for Kids | Summer Activities | Play and Learn Activities |

Check out all of these fun summer STEM activities for kids


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Filed Under: kids, play and learn, science, STEM Activity, summer Tagged With: kid's science activity, LEGO, planets, solar system

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. maryanne @ mama smiles says

    August 7, 2013 at 4:08 pm

    This is brilliant! Pinned to try with the kids soon. Legos and space go together so well!

    • Jen says

      August 7, 2013 at 9:51 pm

      Glad you liked it! Thanks for pinning!

  2. iGameMom says

    August 12, 2013 at 2:55 am

    great idea! Love it.

    • Jen says

      August 12, 2013 at 8:52 am

      Thanks!

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