Okay Elena, today we are going to discuss one of Mommy’s absolute favorite things, Space and the Solar System. Our book is Dr. Seuss’s There’s No Place Like Space! At night when you look into the sky and see the moon and the stars you are looking up into space. To get there, you have to leave our planet and take a space shuttle that shoots straight up into the sky.
Now the first thing you need to know is that everything that exists makes up the universe. Every star in the sky is a sun like our Sun and the number of stars is endless. We can’t possibly see all of them. Our Sun is in a collection of stars known as the Milky Way.
Our sun has eight planets revolving around it, our solar system. The planet closest to the Sun is Mercury, then Venus, Earth, which is our beloved home, then Mars which is red, Jupiter, the largest planet, Saturn, which has a ring around it, then Uranus, and finally Neptune.
Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun which allows for human, plant and animal life to exist. Any closer and we would be too warm, any farther and we would be too cold. We owe a huge debt to the Sun because it provides us with light and heat, two things we could not survive without.
Now what’s really interesting about Earth is that two things are happening at once. Earth is going around the Sun and at the same time it’s spinning on its axis. Because the Earth is spinning, the parts that are facing the Sun create Day and the parts that are not create Night.
A very special day will be next year, July 20th! That is the 50th anniversary of when human beings first walked on the moon. The moon is the only place other than Earth where human beings have walked. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon and he is an American hero.