The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet, 6th-grade go-to space project gold

Don’t tell yourself no. There are many dozens of wisdom nuggets in The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet, but that one is a favorite of ours. Being an astronaut is a job that’s easily identifiable to an elementary-aged student. An analyst or working in public relations are amorphous jobs that are challenging to quantifiably explain what you do in a way that those age’s will understand. But an astronaut that’s a job that everyone knows, even if they don’t know how to become one. For a book centered on leaving the planet, The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet has street-cred galore.

That’s because it’s written by Terry Virts, an astronaut who has spent more than seven months in space. During that time he piloted the space shuttle Endeavour and commanded the International Space Station in 2014. The book is one that speaks directly to kids in a voice and manner that they understand. It asks the questions that kids are thinking about astronauts and answers them in a manner that’s taken from the Nat Geo Kids playbook.

It’s all of that, plus, it has first-hand accounts of what it’s like in space from a real astronaut! A book about cooking and the benefits of creating your own food from recipes that you make is more effective from a world-renowned chef than some knucklehead social influencer. The adventure of going into space is rarely presented from the first-person perspective for young audiences to discover. While I’m sure that there’s been one or two, those books aren’t coming to mind right now. The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet is created for those young readers, even if they don’t want to travel in space.

The first thing that kids will notice is the variety of colors, graphics, illustrations and photographs. These are photographs that adults haven’t seen (unless they’re in the space program) and are paired with illustrations in a realistic-cartoon style. Every single page has at least one of the two on it to coat words with just a little sugar for those reluctant readers.

It’s a chapter book that’s segmented into distinct areas of information, but whose chapters are further broken up. In other words, it’s not a linear story, per se, but each chapter will be relevant to certain topics, like life in space, re-entry, the history of space travel and more. A history of space travel presents different topics like the space race, what early astronauts were most concerned about, why people wanted to be an astronaut and the early NASA programs. Those topics are given one or two pages to briefly cover or introduce their content. It’s just enough space and time to allow readers to learn a little more about something, or to meet an area of STEM study they knew nothing about.

There’s an especially interesting segment in each chapter called Ask an Astronaut. These pages are peppered with those questions that kids have the ability to ask much quicker than adults. What happens when something goes wrong? Why doesn’t all of the air leak out of the shuttle doors when they open? Can you hear or feel any pain in space? Do things burn in space? Can you play video games in space? What was it like to look out of the Cupola? These are great questions and the Cupola is something that you’ve most likely seen but didn’t know what a big deal is it. It’s something that was alluded to years earlier in The Empire Strikes Back and has yielded jaw-dropping images since it was installed on the ISS.

Readers can jump into The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet on any page and find something interesting. They can also read it from start to finish and learn about the rigors and experience required to be an astronaut. The content is great for those readers in fifth grade and up, however, its sweet spot from a STEM, learning perspective is middle school. The book’s use of rounded, cartoon figures might turn off some of those older readers, because they’re cool and want science books without illustrations. Who am I kidding? Those fringe seventh or eighth graders would certainly benefit from the content, but are too cool for school.

You sixth graders, this book is for you. It’s got deep-dive STEM stuff that’ll put your research papers or poster board projects over the top. Those ages need to read this, get STEM curious and have all those obscure space or astronaut questions answered without going to YouTube.

The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet is by Terry Virts with illustrations by Andres Lozano and is available on Workman Publishing.

Below is some motivational metal for kids that want to be astronauts.

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