An Indoor Play Activity
These days, a good planetarium projector costs a little over $300,000. That may be too pricey, but you can create a pretty wild – and even educational – light show with nothing more than a flashlight and some common household items.
Materials Required:
- Flashlight
- Large juice can
- Paper
- Tape or rubber band
- Scissors or X-acto knife (adult use only)
Instructions:
These days, a good planetarium projector costs a little over $300,000. That may be too pricey, but you can create a pretty wild – and even educational – light show with nothing more than a flashlight and some common household items.
To make a home planetarium projector, draw a constellation or random star pattern on a six-inch square piece of paper. (A trip to the local library or bookstore might be helpful if you want an accurate star pattern.)
The next part is for grownups only: Cut out the stars with an X-acto knife-or fold the paper where you would like each hole and clip with a pair of scissors.
Next, remove both ends of a large juice can, and wrap the paper around one end. You can either tape the paper on the end, or hold it in place with a rubber band. Insert a flashlight into the open end, and shine the light onto the ceiling of a darkened room.
Shine the flashlight at an angle, onto the side of the can, rather than directly through the paper, to minimize distortion.
Have your kids hold the light and rotate the stars around the ceiling.
It’s fun – and just think about what you can do with the $299,999 you saved on the projector!
This Children’s Indoor Play Activity is sponsored by Zane Education – the home of online Visual Learning. Visual Learning is a method of online learning that caters for virtually all Learning Styles. Virtually all children prefer Visual Learning as it makes study much more interesting and fun. It is the ideal online education solution – that includes the use of online subtitled educational and curriculum-based video – for disinterested students, special needs education and children that you’d like to see improve their reading and literacy skills as they study the same curriculum topics studied by their classmates and peers. Zane Education provides that and much more.
