Thinking big: Franklin Grove school club building a community solar system

FRANKLIN GROVE – The Really Big Numbers Club gathered in a multipurpose room around a plastic sheet. Cans of paint lined the wall underneath the whiteboard.

The 25 Ashton-Franklin Center Elementary School fourth-graders were there to paint planets for their community solar system.

“They’re a bit messy and a little bit out of control, but I don’t want to run this in such a way that they have to do everything lockstep. I want them to have fun doing it,” said the club’s organizer, Jonathan Thomas-Stagg.

A dedication is planned at the end of the school year.

By then, the planets will be positioned outward from the sun – a yellow geodesic dome in the school’s playground – to Pluto at the Dixon Dairy Queen.

Children will get a free ice cream cone from Dairy Queen if they show they’ve been to all of the planets.

“We started off by deciding if the sun is here, how far do we want people to go to have to see Pluto, and some people were saying, ‘The planetarium in Chicago.’ Some people were saying, ‘China. Let’s put Pluto in China,’” said Thomas-Stagg, who also is a school psychologist for the Ogle County Educational Cooperative.

Based on that scale, some of the planets ended up pretty small, to the surprise of some of the students. Earth is a pingpong ball, and the largest planet, Jupiter, is a giant bouncy ball.

The club originally was designed for 10 weeks in the fall but was expanded to include a voluntary spring project. It went on a field trip to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

“When we first announced that we were doing this club, I thought I’d get maybe five or 10 kids that were interested in it, and we actually had 25 kids interested in it,” Thomas-Stagg said. “And this is a fairly small school, so 25 kids was like 75 percent of the fourth-grade class.”

He said his goal was to expose children to science, technology, engineering and mathematics before they’ve made up their minds on what they like and don’t like.

“We’ve learned phases of the moon, the difference between an asteroid and a meteoroid, stuff like that,” Adler Wiegand, 9, said. “We also looked at some satellite pictures of the sun. As it turns out, the sun is actually white.”

To help

The Really Big Numbers Club doesn’t have a spot for Jupiter yet. If you have a suggestion, call 309-657-4904 or email drjtstagg@gmail.com. Mars will be at the Ashton-Franklin Center Middle School, Saturn will be located on a curve on state Route 38 toward Ashton.