Books
🌿🌻Tell Me About Space by Lisa Varchol Perron (illustrated by Jennifer Falkner)
In this beautifully-illustrated board book, the audience is guided through a series of questions and answers about our solar system. The basic text has simple rhythm and rhyme, but additional text provides deeper explanations of the concepts described.
🌿🌻Moon: A Peek-Through Board Book by Britta Teckentrup
This illustrated board book shows moonlit scenes of wild nightlife around the world. The peek-through images portray the many changing phases of the moon. The cut-out image of the moon changes on each page as it shifts through its phases.
🌿🌻Nerdy Babies: Space by Emmy Kastner
While written more for preschool audiences, this cute board book introduces young children to aspects of space–free of sound, gravity, & warmth–and the orbits of planets and moons. Learn a little about our solar system’s 8 central planets (plus Pluto). Scientists, like babies, are always curious and discovering new things about our world.
🌿🌻 Little Comet by Wednesday Jones (illustrated by Gisela Bohórquez)
I tend to think of this series as being too technical for a pre-K audience to fully understand, but they’ve proven to be consistently engaging for my audiences, and a preschooler understanding even 30% of the science of any natural phenomenon makes these books a worthwhile read–even if they put faces on celestial bodies.
🌿🌻Goodnight Constellations by Running Press (illustrated by Rachel McAlister)
This simple rhyming board book introduces children to 10 constellations in the night sky, including Scorpius, Cynus, and Ursa Major & Ursa Minor.
🌿🌻Animals in the Sky by Sara Gillingham
With simple illustrations and lift-the-flap riddles, this board book introduces children to 7 animal constellations of the night sky, such as the Rabbit, the Wolf, the Southern Fish, and the Eagle.
🌻Baby Loves Lunar Phases on Chinese New Year! by Ruth Spiro (illustrated by Irene Chan)
To be sure, the Baby Loves series is not written at a comprehension level for infants, by any means… but this actually is a great series for explaining science concepts to grown-ups who are reading aloud to infants too young to follow simple stories. In this volume, 3 of 10 pagespreads are spent explaining how and why the light of the moon changes shape throughout the lunar cycle in a way that suddenly felt very simple to me. If my Pre-K audience didn’t understand the full concepts, they were no less interested in these pages than the other 7 spreads devoted to cultural traditions around the celebration.
🌻3, 2, 1… Lift Off!: A First Numbers Book by Frances Darrell (illustrated by Natalie Briscoe)
This simple board book walks children through the elements of an imminent space voyage–including engineers, astronauts, control panels, and rocket boosters– as they count down from 10 to 1 for a safe rocket launch. This book does feature 1-to-1 counting, though the “10 giant screens” and “9 workstations” are difficult to visually delineate.
🌻Montessori: Planet Work by Bobby & June George (illustrated by Alyssa Nassner)
This board book gets full credit for realistic illustrations accompanying simple facts about each planet. A chart on each page consistently indicates every planet’s rough position in the solar system. I love Montessori principles, but the forward claiming to show the relative sizes of planets and provide traceable textures with each planet feels like a bizarre use of space in a board book that failed to deliver on both accounts.
🌻What Are Stars? by Usborne Books (Katie Daynes, illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguens)
This board book features lots of delicate flaps to engage & inform a preschool audience in a question-and-answer format, addressing many common questions about the nature of stars.
🌻Twinkle Twinkle Daytime Star by Elizabeth Everett (illustrated by Beatriz Castro)
While it looks like a book for babies, this board book has content geared for preschool- children. Rhyme schemes and a balanced art style explain the sun’s role in sunburn, day & night, and the length of our year. Note: This book spends several pages suggesting that the seasons change based on the earth’s orbit around the sun. This is a common misconception, as the earth is closest to the sun in January, when the southern hemisphere is experiencing summer but the northern hemisphere is experiencing winter. These seasonal changes are causes by each hemisphere’s gain or loss of daylight as the earth tilts on it axis between solstices.
🌿Star Party by Polly Carlson-Voiles (illustrated by Consie Powell)
This illustrated book tells the story of a family going out to view the stars in the clear sky of the country. Illustrations show nocturnal animals in the woods around the family, active but often unseen. Descriptions of screen doors slapping shut and quiet footsteps on a dock transport readers on a nighttime journey down to the lake where the stars reflect clearly in the water. The book also explores concepts of light pollution that prevent people from clearly seeing the night sky through the expanding haze of nighttime lighting around cities.
🌿Hello, Moon by Evan Turk
This book explores the phases of the moon through the lens of a child saying hello to the moon each evening before bed, walking out into the snowy landscape to view the clear skies. I love that this book is set in the winter because that’s often the best opportunity for very young children to view the moon — when the sun sets well before bedtime.
🌿Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Barbara Firth)
Little Bear struggles to fall asleep surrounded by dark areas and Big Bear thinks of ways to comfort him. This beloved 1988 picture book only features the moon on two pages, but every Space unit I do feels incomplete without this classic exploration of our primal fear of the darkness at night and our deeply human relationship with the moon’s comforting light. It’s also *just* repetitive & wordy enough that it’s difficult to stay awake through the oft-requested second naptime reading when you slow the pacing a bit.
🌿The Night Walk by Marie Dorléans
A family takes a nighttime walk out of town, hiking away from the city lights into the quiet wild. They stop to view the clear night sky before hiking up a rocky hill just in time to watch the first light of dawn emerge over the horizon.
🌿Ada and the Stars by Alan P. Lightman & Olga Pastuchiv (illustrated by Susanna Chapman)
Star-enthused Ada travels from NYC to Maine and explores the wild coast with her grandparents while waiting for nightfall when she can finally see the stars clearly in the clean dark night sky. Disappointed by evening fog, she reads about stars and discusses galaxies with her family until the fog lifts and she can see the brilliant starry night over the ocean.
🌿Full Moon Pups by Liz Garton Scranton (illustrated by Chuck Groenink)
A litter of newborn wolf pups grow and learn in the cycle between one full moon and the next. An author’s note at the end of the book describes the history of wolves in North America. An additional note describes the phases of the moon.
🌿Shadows by April Pulley Sayre (illustrated by Harvey Stevenson)
Two friends explore the mysteries of the shadows cast by dragonflies, fish, birds, balls, trees, and themselves. Through the day, the shadows overlap, mark time, disappear briefly with the rainy cover of clouds, and provide shade on a hot day.
🌿A Few Beautiful Minutes by Kate Allen Fox (illustrated by Khoa Le)
This illustrated book describes the phases of a solar eclipse. It depicts people and wild animals observing an eclipse and explains that viewing an eclipse directly can damage your eyes and that there are safe ways to view an eclipse indirectly through a sun viewer, and two pages show children building and using them. Another page spread shows a few people wearing protective glasses, but the rest of the illustrations show large groups of people looking directly into the sun (some even with binoculars. The illustrations are beautiful but also very questionable.
🌿Secrets of Our Earth by Carron Brown (illustrated by Wesley Robins)
This Shine-a-Light book describes the things that make up our Earth, from land to ocean and volcano to ice. The earth features seashores and deserts and grasslands and rainforests and it has clouds and wind and rain and storms! It also has one moon and many, many people.
Going Around the Sun: Some Planetary Fun by Marianne Berkes (illustrated by Janeen Mason)
Unlike most of the books in Berke’s “Over in the Meadow”-inspired series, this one provides information about the eight planets of our solar system (as well as dwarf planet Pluto, with a reference to its unusual orbit).
Cosmic Wonder: Halley’s Comet and Humankind by Ashley Benham-Yazdani
In this story, Halley’s comet passes by the earth many thousands of years ago. Passing by the earth every 76 years or so, the comet witnesses the changes in the earth and the rise of humans and then civilizations. Eventually humanity takes note of the comet in kind and gives it a name.
The Fire of Stars: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars Are Made of by Kirsten W. Larson (illustrated by Katherine Roy)
This illustrated nonfiction book tells the story of Cecelia Payne, who defied expectations in her pursuit of knowledge and pushed for the answers humanity didn’t yet have. Another story is told simultaneously, describing the life of a star as it comes into being. From there, star and scientist begin to attract others into their orbits, and Cecelia discovers that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium. Additional information about Cecelia Payne, her timeline, and the birth of stars are provided at the end of the book.
Creative Art Opportunities
🪐Collage with glitter on black paper
🪐Collage with paper circles of different sizes and colors
🪐Colored chalk on black paper
🪐Drip painting with white on dark paper
🪐Q-tip painting with white on dark paper
🪐Sponge painting circles in bright colors
🪐Sponge painting white, pink, and blue on dark paper
Hands On Experiences
⛅️Explore star shapes and pompoms in black rice
⛅️Explore planet balls in black rice
⛅️Make cardboard telescopes
⛅️Draw constellations on a large cardboard box and puncture holes to view constellations of light from the inside (invert them if drawing on the outside of the box)
⛅️Explore a beach ball of the earth
⛅️Use recycled bottles to construct model rocket ships
🌿Track the position of the sun–rising in the east, overhead at midday, and setting in the west
🌿Make a sundial with a tall stick (or mark a place for children to stand with their hands raised high). Use painted stones to mark the sun’s position at each hour.
🌿Observe the phases of the moon when visible during the day (many weather apps will track moonrise)
🌿Find constellations in the night sky (in midwinter this may be before 6pm)
🌿Try to spot the “evening star/morning star” – Venus reflects brightly after sunset in the western sky and before sunrise in the eastern sky.
🌿View a solar eclipse – (Take appropriate safety precautions with children of any age!)
🌿View a comet – (older children may be able to view a bright comet through quality binoculars on a winter evening)
Songs to Learn and Sing
“Rocketship Run” – Laurie Berkner
“Zoom Zoom” – Charlie Hope
“Explorers” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“The Big Picture” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“Moon Moon Moon” – Laurie Berkner
“Like an Astronaut” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon” – Sesame Street
“Moon Walking” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Stars Dreaming of Stars” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“I See the Moon” – Lavender Lullabies
“One of a Kind (Stars)” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Moon Above” – Stephanie Leavell
“Everywhere Stars” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“Dark of Night” – Caspar Babypants
“Sun Go” – Caspar Babypants
“Earth Sweet Earth” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“Lunar Oceans” – Claudia Robin Gunn
“Take the Sun” – Caspar Babypants
NIYN – Space on Spotify
NIYN – Space on YouTube
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.
Nature In Your Nurture 