2. There is plenty of good reference material available giving clear information about the planets. (See Planet Information Table at the end of this unit for facts and figures.)

The success of this sort of task depends on the children’s experience of researching a topic and it might be as well to spend a little time teaching them to do this. A common mistake children make when doing research is to simply copy paragraphs out of books without reading them properly or thinking about the information they really need. A planning sheet is a good idea so that they firstly think about what they want to find out and make a list of questions to answer.

Then they must be able to find books which will lead them to the answers. If books are in short supply you may be able to make up some information sheets which can be photocopied and placed into a folder so that the whole class can work simultaneously.

The next skill the children need is to be able to read a section and pull out the information they want. This could be practised in a language lesson and there are language textbooks which focus on this sort of skill.

More able children will be able to research their topic and present their results without too much difficulty but less able children find this sort of task very difficult and tend to waste time. A more structured sort of approach may be useful with them - set them specific bits of information to find and make sure that the books they are using are written in a way that is accessible for poor readers.

An alternative would be to make up sets of information cards each with a single detail about a planet or part of the solar system. Children would then need to assemble the correct cards for their particular planet and to take information off the cards to fill in a worksheet. This could even be made into a game.

Worksheet C1 (G) could be used to help the children focus their research and gives them specific information to find.

It could be used as a basis for a talk and if each planet has been researched by a group or individual the collected sheets could be made into a planet booklet.

Size of the Planets and the Sun