Learning Together with a Four-year-old (redux)

My grandson and I had an interesting conversation recently. He had received a packet of material for his Zoom pre-school that included punch-outs of the planets in the solar system, one of his favorite topics. The circle for Uranus was smaller than the circle for Neptune. In a discussion about the size of planets, he stated that Neptune was larger than Uranus. I told him that my recollection was that Uranus was the larger of the two. He became very insistent that he was right and I was wrong by pointing to the size of the punched out circles. We then went on the Internet to settle the debate. I also reminded him that when we did the planet walk at the El Dorado park, the written description accompanying the sidewalk image of the planets stated that Uranus was four times the size of Earth and Neptune was slightly less than four times the size of Earth. What we finally concluded from our research was that Uranus was slightly larger in size but Neptune was heavier. I was proud that after reading several credible sources together, he changed his viewpoint. He then told me that his teacher was wrong. I said she wasn’t wrong, but the company that made the punch-outs had not scaled the circles to the respective sizes. As another example, the circle for Mars was the same size as the one for Earth and he knew that Mars was smaller. All in all an informative discussion for both of us.