Planets in Order from the Sun

A row of eight planet cards runs across the top of this 3rd grade page, each with a small drawing and a name, shuffled: Mars, Neptune, Earth, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus on the sheet shown. Saturn wears its rings and Uranus a thin upright ring. Below, a corner of the Sun sits at the top left, and eight numbered writing lines step down and away from it, each at the end of a dotted orbit. The child writes the name of each planet on its line, starting next to the Sun, and uses every name in the bank once.

The order of the planets is one of those facts children love to know, and this page gives it a picture: the lines step further from the Sun as the numbers go up, so distance and order are shown together. The planet drawings give clues without giving the answer away, Earth easy to recognize and the giants striped and ringed, so a child who remembers that the rocky planets come first can use the pictures to check. Pluto is not in the bank; it has been counted as a dwarf planet since 2006.

One sheet, eight planets, eight lines. A memory sentence such as My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Noodles helps. The planets are not part of the kindergarten to grade 2 science standards, and NGSS brings the solar system in later still, so this is an enrichment page for grade 3. The giant and rocky planets face sorts the same eight planets by kind, which makes a good second page.