Me and My Place in Space

This book is great! Excellent teaching tool. Engaging for children.

I bought this book to introduce a unit on Saturn for my third grade class. When I first scanned the book I thought maybe I'd made a mistake and bought something beneath their level. Not so! I read it aloud to them & they loved it. They all wanted to take it home to read again.

Great illustrations, and informative non-fiction for preschoolers. I am a big beleiver in improving young children's vocabulary through non-fiction reading. This book series will help keep your youngsters attention while you talk to him/her about the world around us. A couple sentences per page. If you want to read another science series with more reading and more detail, but still great illustrations try the "Let's read and find out science" series including "Why Frogs are Wet" and many others.

My one year old daugher and I read this book at least once a day. She loves the illustrations-like the space suit with pop beads for the oxygen line. It is not too wordy, so she stays engaged, yet provides all the basic information about our solar system and planets. She can now identify the pictures of the moon and the earth by name and knows that earth is where she lives. An animal lover, she also likes that the cat journeys into space. My daughter and I often look at the night sky, and she knows the ASL signs for moon and stars. I think that is why she loves this book so much despite her young age. This is a wonderful introduction to basic astronomy, and has spurred me to order more books on space for us to share.

We use this book and its predecessor, Me On The Map, to teach map concepts in First grade. Children this age generally have difficulty with the "nesting" idea of these things--that you can be in a county, state, country, continent, on a planet, and in a solar system, all at once. These books do a good job of making this more tangible and easier to grasp. It is especially effective when students do a re-write following the reading and personalize it to their own place on the map.