Planets: Planets

Purchased this for my little boy when he was 20 months old. He's now 22 months, and can now easily identify all of the planets. He also enjoys the stickers. Very good book for teaching the basics of our solar system (especially a young mind). Very clear, easy to understand, and the poem format is a nice way to introduce the planets in order from the Sun. Recommend.

I bought this book for my son when he was 2 1/2, (He's obsessed with our solar system), and it's a year later and he still loves to read it. We purchased this one for his friend's 3rd birthday and word is that he can't put it down either.

This is my absolute favorite book to read to my classroom of 4-6 year olds! It starts with the sun on the left, then goes through all the planets, with short pages and easy text for each one. I love it because it really reinforces the order of planets from the sun, and because the text is so simple and catchy. Plus, as you turn pages, you see all the previous planets on the left. LOVE IT!!!

My son received this book for his 3rd birthday. While he enjoyed the stickers (although not reusable), he couldn't get enough of the poem about the planets. We read it to him often, and pretty soon he was able to recite the poem himself (quite impressive to friends and family!). In doing so he leared some basic, interesting facts about the 9 planets. I would recommend this book to other parents looking for a way to introduce the fundamentals of the solar system to their child.

For me, the most striking portion of the book is the first part containg a poem about the planets. It's method of presentation in the book is just as well done. Unlike many of more crowded books on the solar system, it presents the solar system in more of a realistic environment: lots of uncluttered black space. The first page starts with an illustration of the sun against a mostly black background: "This is the sun, shining so bright, giving us the energy of heat and light."Turn a very small page, the first and smallest of nine progressively larger that eventually reach the full over-sized pages in the book. There you find Mercury with a brief poetic description of it and a repeating of the lines for the sun. Turn the next slightly larger page to see both Mercury and Venus. Here lines for Venus are found with a repeating of those for Mercury. Turn the next slight larger page and the pattern repeats until a full-sized page contains all nine planets and the lines for Pluto and Neptune. Turn the full-sized page and the completed poem, starting at the sun, is found. It's thoughtful and well written. To fully appreciate the poem, some basic knowledge of the plants is necessary, such as Uranus spinning on its side, Mars being red and the crossing of Neptune's and Pluto's orbits. The following section, "Did You Know?" contains fairly detailed information about our universe, the solar system, the sun and planets. The book contains no photographs, but because of the vivid illustrations, this is not a problem. In one respect, the stickers are a bit disappointing. Although they claim to be reusable, they are very hard to remove when stuck to pages of the book. After discovering this, we haven't experimented with them very much. They do contain nice illustrations of the sun, planets, two space shuttles, three comets, two asteroid "belts", and three galaxies: irregular, spiral and barred spiral. This book is well suited to children who already have some background in the solar system. It does work as a nice complement to many of the basic beginner solar system books.