My local astronomy club had a great time at an elementary school STEM night tonight. With rainy weather outdoors, we set up our telescopes in the gym and let students read signs across the room. I used a couple of Night Sky Network toolkits to explain the scale of the solar system, the Mars Insight mission and handed out NASA goodies.
Despite the weather, a couple hundred students and their parents showed up. I held up a scale model of the Earth and handed students a scale model of the Moon and had them guess at the distance between them. Nearly everyone underguessed by a wide margin. I had a lot of comments about how they never realized just how vast the space between the planets was.
My favorite comment was when an adult was looking at scale sizes of the planets and realized that Pluto was most comparable in size to the asteroid Ceres. She exclaimed, "No wonder they demoted it to a dwarf planet.... but now what will I do with My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas? Change it to Served Us Nothing?"