The Magic School Bus "Lost in the Solar System"-Science Fiction

The Magic School Bus, “Lost in the Solar System” by Joanna Cole is a great science fiction book for many reasons. One reason I really enjoyed this book is because it had such great pictures!  All the pictures were bright and exciting to look at as I read.  In this story as usual Ms. Frizzle is taking her class on a trip to the planetarium to see a solar system show.  At the show the students hope to learn what a solar system is and how it works.  They want to know about orbits, what makes day and night, etc, but to their disappointment the planetarium is closed.  But if anybody knows Ms. Frizzle the fun doesn’t stop here because she decides that she will take the class to space instead.  As the bus turns into a spaceship the students learn about how real spaceships work and about something we have all heard of, gravity.  Quickly the students begin to float around because they have become weightless in space, which we also call gravity.  Next, the students step outside for a walk on the moon where they learn about channels, polar ice caps, canyons, volcanoes, dust storms, and much more! After a long day in space the students return to school with so much to tell their parents about all the cool things they learned in space.  I think this is such a great book for student’s grades 3-5 because it has many great facts about our solar system, and it creates a fun way for students to learn it.  Instead of them reading a book with all facts, they are able to read a great imaginative story about a class taking a trip to space, and through that they learn many things.  I would use this book in my class to talk about our solar system and different things that one might find there.  It would be a great book to introduce the class into the topic and then afterwards go on to teach in more detail about topics in the book such as gravity, channels, dust storms, etc.  After I had read the book and taught the lesson I would have students write a short story about a day in space from their point of view.  In this story students would need to use technical words that we had discussed, but also make it exciting and creative