14 SCIENCE SCOPE Visualizing the Earth and Moon Relationship via Scaled Drawings Visualizing the Earth and Moon Relationship via Scaled Drawings S tudents’ difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film A Private Universe (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will re- member the challenge the interviewees experienced when trying to ex- plain their understanding of this phenomenon. This paper describes a strategy to help students develop a model of the Earth/Moon relationship that is correct both in terms of the scale sizes and the distances between them and extends previous work presented in Science Scope (see Wallace, Dickerson, and Hopkins 2007; Riddle 2006a). By the end of this lesson, middle school students will gain a better understanding of the following: the relative orbital positions of the Earth-Moon systems, • the causation of lunar phases and eclipses, • scale drawings that show and compare locations of the Earth and Moon • dimensions, and cosmic scale when the frame of reference is shifted away from the Earth. • by Chuck Fidler and Sharon Dotger