INMAN — In Kim Herron and Cameron Traxson’s sixth grade classroom at Inman Elementary School, space is all around you — literally.

Walls are decorated from the ground up in an outer space theme. Although Herron describes herself as an outer space nerd, what really excites her is watching her students take their imagination and knowledge to a whole new level.

In her STEAM class, which involves science, technology, engineering, art and math, students were asked to make a model of the solar system to scale in the schools hallway.

"We've done this project on different scales. I've done smaller scales of the solar system but its been in my mind of how we can make it and share it with others. Some years we've done activities where we've walked the distance and ratios and actually ended up on the whole other side of town," Herron explained. "We wanted to be able to share it with the school and be able to keep it up and anything we can do to visualize the distance and ratios are a big portion of our math curriculum and this ties in perfectly with our science curriculum too."

Before starting the project, students in Herron's class took a field trip to the Cosmosphere Museum in Hutchinson where they began to learn about the planets. When they returned to school, Herron used bracelets and beads to demonstrate the ratios and distance between planets. From there, the project grew into something she would have never imagined.

To begin, students first learned about the distance in between each planet, then gathered materials on their own to make their planets, built them and then hung them from the ceiling.

"We learned about them by researching and using our resources. Our teachers also gave us mini lessons and helped us out with math," said student Kellen Schrag.

"They got a lot of resources from their iPads and then we also went to the library and checked out books, so they had to go find their resources," Herron said. "I gave them the distance of the hallway, which was 226 feet and then the width and they had to calculate it out."

Planets were then strung across the hallway at the correct distances from the “sun” — a hula hoop with paper streamers.

Figuring out sizes wasn't an easy task for some students, as some planets are larger than others.

Although the task was difficult, students used creative solutions, such as using fish hooks to hold larger planets to the ceiling and chicken wire to keep their planet’s shape.

"For Saturn, it's one of the bigger planets. So basically we took two hoola hoops and put it as the diameter that we needed and took chicken wire over that then we put paper over that and spray painted it," said student Madilyn Heflin.

In addition to figuring out ratios, diameters and distance, students also had to figure out ways to explain their planets to second grade students. At each station, students presented a poster with facts and an iPad that showed a video about their planet.

"In our video, we did a newscast but other students just did a picture of their planet and explained it," said student Kambrey Woods.

In teaching the project to younger students, the sixth graders needed to fully understand their information so they could tell others about it in layman’s terms.

"What was really interesting was that we had a whole bunch of big words then we had to write them into sentences so they could understand it. We couldn't say ‘astronomical unit,’ we had to say something else," said student Violet Stevens.

"In my group we used the word orbit and some of them didn't know what the word was. I was teaching groups what it meant and we let them do an activity where one person stood in the middle and we walked around in a circle around them," Kellen Schrag explained.

"Groups didn't understand why there was a rocket ship at our planet so we used it as an example of Voyager II and then we showed them a picture of a real one," said student Lexi Hase.

When the project was finished and tours began, Herron was thrilled to see what her students accomplished.

"This is the part that's fun about teaching. It’s why I do it. It's a passion. It's exciting to watch them. I like to watch my excitement for space rub off on them. As they get excited, you can tell. It's fun watching them go from being nervous to giving researched facts. They weren't even looking at their cards the last few times — it was natural," Herron said.

For more information, visit the Inman Schools page on Facebook.

Contact Brooke Haas by email at bhaas@mcphersonsentinel.com or follow her on Twitter @ MacSentinel.