We're celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing with a whole week filled with books based on our love of Space Exploration.

Can you imagine how cool it would be to turn up to school knowing that you're off on a field trip to somewhere spectacularly out of this world?

Skip ahead a few years then for "Field Trip to the Moon" by Jeanne Willis and John Hare. A truly amazing day trip to a dusty destination is on the cards for a class full of kids.

One kid in particular finds the grey landscape a little less than inspiring, but up there in the dark inky black sky is a tiny blue and green orb - our own home planet, Earth.

A day trip to the moon? How cool would that be!

As the little girl sketches up a storm with her super-colourful crayons, the very worst thing happens. She's separated from her school group - who rocket off back to earth without her!

Lost and forlorn, the little girl soon realises that she's not alone...

ALIENS! Thankfully these are the nice kind!

Her new pals understand her plight, but thankfully the school realises it could be in serious trouble for leaving a pupil behind (don't teachers take head counts in the future?) and soon she's back on her way home - minus a few glorious colours from her crayon box.

This is whimsical, delightful stuff - again a fab inspiration for kids who look up at the moon and wonder what it would be like up there.

Sum this book up in a sentence: Brilliant rhymes, awesome illustrations and a fun jolly theme with wide appeal.

"Field Trip to the Moon" by Jeanne Willis and John Hare is out now, published by Macmillan Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

More fab bookage to continue our celebration of space, in the week running up to the 50th Anniversary of the first moon landing.

"Spaced Out" by Brian Moses and James Carter gathers together some stunning verses inspired by and based around our exploration of space.

From rockets to asteroids, aliens to astronauts, Brian and James have come up trumps, curating an amazing selection of verse with something for just about everyone who has ever looked up at the stars and been inspired by the sights our night sky has to offer.

Blast off into space and explore the galaxies with a constellation of illustrated poems about the sun, moon and stars, black holes and worm holes, asteroids and meteorites, and even weird alien life forms.

From shape poems and free verse to rhymes, kennings and haikus, Spaced Out will take you on an intergalactic adventure. 

We're celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landings in style this week with a whole selection of awesome space-themed books.

This one's hugely important, as it chronicles the life story of one of the key figures in the space race, contributing a huge amount to ensuring that the Apollo missions went as smoothly as possible, even in one case keeping a cool head when disaster struck.

"Counting on Katherine" is a fantastic picture book all about Katherine Johnson, one of the human "Computers" whose maths skills and amazing level-headedness were vital to early space missions, calculating and projecting courses that spacecraft would take as they reached for orbit, and beyond to the moon.

Though she may not be as widely known as she should be, Katherine's contributions are lovingly detailed in this book, starting with her early life and her love of counting and numbers, through to difficult times as she struggled with racial inequality in America, before finally enrolling in college and being recruited as one of the "Human Computers" performing hugely complicated calculations as a contribution to the early NASA Space Programme.

There are some great moments in this book and of course Katherine's achievements are detailed - but I was very surprised that more wasn't made of her contribution to returning the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 - the mission to the moon that nearly ended in disaster as an explosion on board the ship put their lives in peril. Katherine was tasked with plotting a course to bring the men home safely - something you won't see in the movie (which is annoying) but is redressed here in a fab picture book that's hugely inspirational and important for all space fans - and for all kids who love maths and want to know what they can do with their amazing numerical brains.

Sum this book up in a sentence: A fantastic lifestory of a woman who deserves far wider recognition, a pivotal figure in the US Space Programme.

"Counting on Katherine" by Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk is out now, published by Macmillan Children's Books (kindly supplied for review). 

We're kicking off a whole week of space-tastic reviews on the run up to the 20th July. This coming saturday will mark the official 50th Anniversary of the very first moon landing, and that one small step for a man turning into a giant leap for mankind.

In "The Darkest Dark" by Chris Hadfield and Eric & Terry Fan, find out what one little boy thought of the moon landings as he clustered around a television at his parents' island-based holiday home, along with many others to watch those first grainy pictures broadcast direct from the moon as Neil Armstrong took that final step towards an incredible and amazing achievement.

Cmdr Chris Hadfield was one of the first astronauts in the Canada Space Agency, and is one of the best ambassadors for space exploration and research. We've watched many of his broadcasts from the International Space Station in awe.

But can you believe that Chris, as a child, was afraid of the dark?

In this inspirational first fictional picture book from Chris, illustrated by the hugely talented Fan brothers (Eric and Terry) you'll learn how Chris overcame his fear, and was inspired by the moon landings to first learn to fly, then pilot fighter jets before entering the space program later in life.

For anyone watching those broadcasts from the moon, it must have been an amazing time to be alive.

I was a tiny little speck of a one year old human at the time, so it kinda washed over me - but it's become something of an obsession for our family with my wife and I, and of course C all absolutely nutty about space.

This book works on two levels, brilliant for space fans who want to get to know more about how Chris grew up to become an astronaut, and also a touching little story about what it's like to confront your fears, face up to a fear of the dark, and overcome that fear to become the person you really want to be.

A brilliant book to kick off our Space Week!

Sum this book up in a sentence: A neat little biographical story twinned with a message comforting kids who may be frightened of the dark themselves.

"The Darkest Dark" by Chris Hadfield and The Fan Brothers is out now, published by Macmillan Children's Books (kindly supplied for review).