Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth is an expository nonfiction text about planet Earth such as the basic parts of Earth, Earth from space, exploiting Earth’s resources, some of the damage done to Earth, and responsibilities of humans. The text uses the analogy of astronauts going into space and what they need in order to survive to explain what we need to do to keep Earth surviving. Readers gain interesting information from text and graphics. A two-page experiment written in third person procedural language invites students to explore the effects of acid rainfall on buildings and statues.

Spaceship Earth is divided into sections. A range of illustrations are used which add information and support the reader’s interpretation of the text, including labeled photos and diagrams. Many fact boxes and sidebars are used to provide students with additional learning opportunities. Periods, commas, exclamation marks, and question marks are used. A table of contents, a glossary, and an index support the reader.

Sentences structures and lengths vary with a wide variety of parts of speech. A full range of plurals and compound words are used. Sentences contain common and sophisticated connectives, possessives, contractions, prepositional phrases, and verbs with inflection endings. Glossary words are bold faced throughout the text. Some words appear in the vocabulary of mature language users.

This title is from the Science Readers series from Teacher Created Materials. Build literacy skills and science content knowledge with high-interest, appropriately levelled information texts.