A few weeks ago, I shared books for Team Deep Ocean. This week
is for those of you who look up instead of down, the teachers whose students
want to talk about Mars rovers and Black holes and women who calculated rocket
trajectories by hand. This list is for you.
Team Outer Space books:
📗 Hidden Figures:
Young Readers' Edition by Margot Lee Shetterly
Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked
on the moon, a group of African American female mathematicians, known as
"human computers" used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to
calculate the numbers that would launch rockets into space. This young readers'
edition brings the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson,
and Christine Darden to life for grades 5–9. It's nonfiction that reads with
the urgency of an action novel, set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights era, the
Space Race, and the Cold War. I love that it shows what was possible for these
women, even when everything around them was designed to say otherwise.
👉 Check out the novel
study guide I created for it.
📗 A Rover's Story
by Jasmine Warga
Resilience is a Mars rover who was built
to explore, not to feel. But somewhere between the NASA lab and the surface of
Mars, he starts to develop something that seems a lot like human emotions. Told
through Res's journal entries and letters from a young girl named Sophie (the
daughter of one of his engineers), this book covers more than 20 years of a
rover's life. It's been compared to
The Wild Robot and
The One and
Only Ivan, which tells you everything you need to know about how
emotionally invested you're going to get in a machine. It was the Global Read
Aloud selection in 2023 and earned starred reviews everywhere. A #1
New York
Times bestseller, which makes absolute sense.
👉 Check out the
novel
study guide I created for it.
📗 We Dream of Space
by Erin Entrada Kelly
It's 1986, and three siblings in a small
Delaware town are each struggling with something. Bird wants to be an
astronaut, Cash is failing seventh grade, and Fitch is trying to hold himself
together. The backdrop is the Challenger space shuttle disaster, which unfolds
in real time over the course of the novel. Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery
Medal for Hello, Universe, and this one has the same warmth and
details. It's historical fiction grounded in a specific, devastating moment
in American history, the kind of book that makes space feel personal rather
than distant.
👉 You can learn more about Erin Entrada Kelly on her website.
📗 See You in the
Cosmos by Jack Cheng
Eleven-year-old Alex Petroski is building a rocket to launch
his golden iPod into space, inspired by Carl Sagan's golden record on the
Voyager probe, so that alien life might one day hear what Earth sounds like.
The book is told through audio recordings Alex makes along the way as he
travels from Colorado to New Mexico to Las Vegas to New York. It's quirky,
tender, and genuinely funny. Alex is one of those protagonists who makes you
root hard for him from the very first page. I think of this one as the Wonder
of the space genre. It's that kind of book.
👉I wrote this nonfiction piece about The Golden Record.
👉 Find out more at Jack Cheng's website.
📗 Astrophysics for
Young People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, this one is pure nonfiction, but it's Neil deGrasse
Tyson, so it's also funny, clear, and never condescending. This is an
adaptation of his bestselling adult book, and it covers everything from the Big
Bang to dark matter to why the universe is mostly nothing. I'd hand this to
your science-curious students who finish novels in a day and need something to
chew on. It's the kind of book that makes a kid feel like they're in on a
secret about how everything works.
📗 Endurance: My Year
in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery — Young Readers' Edition by Scott Kelly
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the
International Space Station, and this young readers' edition of his memoir is
one of the most accessible, fascinating pieces of nonfiction I've come across
for this age group. He writes about what it's actually like to live in space: sleeping, eating, exercising, watching the Earth turn beneath you. Your
students who think space is just about rockets will be genuinely surprised.
👉 Find out more about Scott Kelly at his
website.
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