Satellites

Children's Literature - Lisa P. Hill

The book cover depicts a satellite above Earth's atmosphere with swirling white clouds below. This intriguing picture will grab any child's attention to study satellites! Each chapter offers one or two paragraphs on each page with supportive photographs or historical drawings. Important words are italicized and explained in each paragraph and defined in the rear glossary. Concepts like gravity, different orbits, and satellite types are explained at an elementary student's level. Important historical persons and their discoveries are outlined in this story. Historical information helps students understand how we began learning about satellites and outer space, and what future exploration expeditions are planned. The interesting photographs and visual drawings help students understand what satellites first looked like, where they were used, and what is planned for future space exploration. Students, parents, and teachers can use this book for book reports or informative reading in the classroom or at home.

School Library Journal

Gr 2-4-These introductions earn high marks for visual appeal and offer information that's well tuned to their intended audience, but their presentations are variously flawed. Each title pairs full-bleed, well-reproduced space photos (or sometimes artists' images, but always so noted) with digestible but specific narratives in large, legible fonts, and closes with appropriate-leveled multimedia resource lists. In Galaxies, Elish opens with the Big Bang, discusses various types of galaxies and how they were discovered, then follows with a chapter on quasars with oddly one-sided arguments supporting the idea that there is no other life in the universe. Satellites lucidly surveys the past and present uses of these devices, but simplistically asserts that they are given elliptical orbits to counter Earth's gravitational pull. Sun begins with the poorly expressed claim that people have been fascinated by the Sun "since the beginning of time," then asserts that the hot-air balloon depicted in the accompanying photo uses helium. In addition, though it's hardly the author's fault, references to the nine planets in Galaxies and The Sun date both titles. Unless in desperate need of fresh material on topics astronomical, selectors should hold off in hopes of doing better when the undoubted flood of updates and revised editions hits.-John Peters, New York Public Library Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.