Asteroid Belt

All things involving space fascinate my 4 year old. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know (or didn’t remember) that the Asteroid Belt is located between Mars and Jupiter until he informed me! After we discussed that asteroids are made of rocks and metal in various shapes and sizes- some small, some bigger than our house, some bigger than the state we live in- he asked me if we could make the Asteroid Belt. Apparently he didn’t realize he knew as much, if not more, about the subject than I did!

I went with the idea that the asteroids comprising the belt are all different. To represent the irregularity of the asteroids, my son broke apart several different pasta shapes (lasagna, shells, elbows, spaghetti, and fusilli). That was definitely his favorite part! He then painted a large arch of glue onto dark paper and placed the pasta pieces into the paper. He also decided to glue on some of the dried glue we had removed from our glue tube. Then he ran and got chalk and drew on Mars and Jupiter! Might not be to scale, but we had fun.