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Solar Manipulative of Sun's Interior

Ben Wentworth - Tactile Learning Adventures

Pictures of the sun's anatomy are not difficult to locate on the web. However, these often do little for the visually impaired student and nothing for the blind student. Making a tactile model of the picture to the left is really not that difficult to do. [Note picture of completed model at end of instructions.] A little time and patience and the following materials and you are on your way.

You will need a variety of pipe cleaners, a one inch Styrofoam ball, (a 2 inch ball is pictured but I found that a 1 inch works better), plastic craft line, peanuts, raisins, two large grout sponges, and a hot glue gun. The grout sponges were obtained from Home Depot. Not pictured is 22 gauge picture hanging wire. The waxed string ended up not being used.

To begin, hot glue the two sponges together. Only glue a section in the middle of the sponges or you will have a very difficult time trimming them into a sphere. This glued area will later be used as the Radioactive Zone in your model.

Once you have the sponges glued together, draw a circle on top and cut this out using an Exacto knife with a long blade. With this being done, use scissors around the edges to create a rough sphere. Don't worry about making your solar sphere exactly smooth as the sun's surface is in constant turmoil and not smooth. Save your cut out pieces for later projects. You will also need some to enlarge the Radiative Zone on your model. Also be sure to leave one part of your sphere somewhat flat so that it will sit on a table without rolling around.

You are now ready to cut one eighth of the sphere away to reveal the interior. The area with the arrow will give you some trouble as this is where the hot glue is. You will feel that this area is more solid than the area around it which will become the Radiative Zone.

Cut the one inch Styrofoam ball in half, cutting one half into quarters and then again into eights. One of the 1/8 pieces will be used to represent the sun's core.

Taking a 1/8 section of the Styrofoam ball, place it into the center of the model by pulling edges of the sphere gently apart and inserting the Styrofoam. The roughness of the sponge and the Styrofoam will hold the core piece in place. Do not use hot glue as this melts the Styrofoam!

Raisins for negatively charged sun spots and peanuts for positively charged sun spots along with black pipe cleaners for filaments can now be hot glued onto the sponge.

With a pair of small scissors cut two small holes in your sponge about an inch and a half apart to insert the ends of pipe cleaners representing a prominence. Over one hole hot glue a raisin that you have cut a small hole through its center. Over the other hole hot glue a peanut that you have likewise cut a hole through its center. (If you find that it takes a few peanuts before you get one that does not break on you don't worry, you can always eat your mistakes and no one will know.)

Using craft pipe cleaners create a prominence. Once this is done, put hot glue into the holes you've made in the sponge and insert the ends of the pipe cleaners through the raisin and peanut and into these holes. You now have your prominence in place.

Use rolled cotton to create the solar wind or coronal streamers. Hot glue these strips to various spots on the sponge. (Cotton balls do not work as they will fall apart and not hold the streamer shape.) Hot glue some of the cut off sponge pieces onto an area around the core. This will create the Radiative Zone going up the two sides of your model.

Hot glue the plastic cord approximately 1/4 inch along the edge of the cut out section of the model. This will mark the boarder between the Conductive Zone and the Photosphere. The Photosphere is the area between the cord and the surface with the surface being the Chromosphere. Twenty-two gauge wires are used to represent some of the magnetic fields. You will note that even though the lines are shown in the picture, they are not labeled as such. You can either label them or challenge students to find out what they are.

A large red pipe cleaner is hot glued around the sun's equator for easy orientation of the solar sphere for the totally blind.

And now you have a tactile model that will not only work with a blind individual, but will also aid any student to more easily visualize in their mind's eye the concepts being depicted with the picture.