Project: Solar System

For those of you who don't know, I tutor a fabulous fourth grader named Diamonique once a week. Her mom, Erica, is one of my very good friends, and is a police officer at my school. Diamond had to create a project about the solar system, but Erica was working from 4pm to 12am the week the solar system project was due, and Diamond needed someone to help her put her project together. Erica enlisted my help/crafting abilities to help Diamond get an A+. I had Erica pick up some styrofoam balls from the Wall-Mart crafting department, and had her bring a coat hanger. (I don't have any wire hangers lying around ever since seeing: "Mommie Dearest" haha). I had the rest of the supplies we needed-- paint, glitter, fishing line, and brads.

We decided we were going to make a hanging mobile, so I used pliers to re-shape the hanger. First I straightened out all of the: "kinks" and then shaped that into a "circle" shape and twisted it all together.

 I had Diamond start with the sun-- she painted it with gold paint and then rolled it in gold glitter. The gold paint acted like a glue, and covered any spots that the glitter may have missed.

We also painted the other planets with fun colors using acrylic paint.

Diamond's brother Tyreek was patiently waiting for us to finish Diamond's project-- and borrowed one of Lauren's books to pass the time. Pretty impressive reading for a seventh grader! haha. I don't know how much of it he read, but he looked pretty awesome reading Flannery O'Connor.

I covered the wire hanger with black, satin ribbon. I attached the ribbon to the wire using hot glue to get it to stick to the wire. I twisted the ribbon around the wire so that all of the wire was covered, and then when the wire was completely covered with the black ribbon, I cut and glued four ribbons on so that the project could be a mobile. If you pretend the wire circle is a clock, you should place the four ribbons at the 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 areas of the of the "clock." Then I tied them together into a nice bow at the top so that Diamond could hold onto it.

 Next, we pressed one brass brad in each of the Styrofoam planets and then double knotted our fishing line around it. Then we tied the other end of the fishing line onto the wire hanger. We then attached all of the planets and the finished product looked like this:

Hopefully Diamond gets an A+!! If she doesn't, I don't know what an A project looks like!